The Press no. 5/2009
After navigating the high places of Freudian sexual symbolism, shoes seemed to have expired to the normality of aesthetic valence. But, today, the renowned affairs of Muntazer al Zaidi and Bush in Baghdad, of a Cambridge student and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, of an unnamed Stockholmer and Israeli Ambassador Benny Dagan, have given shoes their semantic dignity in the representation of contemptuous dissent. As is evident from the media hype, regardless of use, shoemakers, English leather masters, cobblers, and Royal House uppers will continue to benefit. That’s the way things in life go. On one side are the rude barefoot protesters and, on the other, the unfortunate targets with their lack of innocence, their shred of arrogance, their boulder of inappropriateness.
In a world in which communication is enriched with tools, it loses power its fundamental unit of measurement, which is the word, and certain gestures that we would have liked to have been relegated, if anything, to the intimacy of the walls of the home become important and conceivable. But no. The scarring of the thrown shoe has been applied in a diplomatic office and a couple of university classrooms–for now. Vulgarity lies not so much in the disregard for minimal etiquette decency as in not knowing how to reserve “elegant” behavior of cultural and ethical superiority for deserving occasions. On YouTube, the revolutionary and pathetic twirling shoe makes the rounds and seems likely to ignite protesting fetishists. Seeing and disproportionately reviewing the films we would like to convince ourselves to applause. Personally, I can’t. In the most benevolent interpretation and the most daring simile, we could ascribe to these acts the value of modern resurgent attempts with a revision and updating of method compared to the irony of Giusti’s St. Ambrose and the solemnity of the chorus of Nabucco.
More realistically, I attribute the shoe-throwing to the role of a trivial outburst with poor symbolic penetration and even no physical effect. At least take good aim for a healable laceration-contusion. I am helped in this belief by a poem composed in honor of the Iraqi journalist after Bush’s dodges: “…even the shoes wouldn’t kiss him….” There is more contemptuous expression in these words than in a thousand shoes that could have stamped their imprint on the presidential veneer.
