Angry Arab makes fun of western reporters who say that throwing shoes at someone is a sign of disrespect in Arab culture, as if it isn't here, too. Gabriel at JSF makes fun of what he says will be a refrain in the press: showing the soles of the feet is a sign of contempt in Arab culture.
Well, I'm with the western reporters and orientalists. This episode will forever mark the Bush presidency because of its peculiar symbolism: avenging the most horrific violence with a symbolic sign of utter contempt. It will be the way the Iraq war is signified in war documentaries. (Just as Bush's father's vomiting in Japan marked his presidency, and Jimmy Carter's cardigan sweater.) You can't remove the shoeness from it. It wasn't a blackberry or a microphone, it was shoes.
And as an American who has spent time in the third world, I say, don't try to remove all differences in culture from these different experiences. People don't take their shoes off when they go into American houses, they do in the Third World. Feet have a different significance in the third world, in my humble experience. The first foreign country I visited, Samoa, in 1978, it was the second of three rules I was told, by a Peace Corps volunteer: don't show the soles of your feet to anyone. (And don't walk past an older person, but stop and let him pass; and don't walk and eat at the same time–rules I never learned in the U.S.) Third world cities have more s**t and sewage in the streets. So let us celebrate the shoeness of the incident: The baseness of George Bush is revealed in that moment, and also, the delicacy of other cultures.
