Is the shoe deadlier than the bomb?
Last month Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi, well-known for throwing his shoes at former President George W. Bush last December during a press conference, was sentenced to three years in prison for his “crime.” Mr. Zeidi was charged with aggression against a visiting head of state, and there was reportedly heavy protest from the Iraqi public after the verdict was read. According to a New York Times article, there were supporters chanting “hero” outside the Iraqi court house, and a statue of a large shoe was erected north of Baghdad to honor Mr. Zaidi; however the Iraqi Parliament ordered the statue dismantled.
I think this case of presidential “shoeing” is a great example of how upside-down some conceptions of “justice” can be; and, given that our President was both the impetus and the target of those volatile projectiles, it tells us something about our country’s values as well.
On the one hand, you have the President of a nation that had waged, and had continued to wage, an immensely violent war of aggression on another country’s land appearing, in person, within that country’s borders (albeit in a “green zone” heavily guarded by the president’s own soldiers) to speak as if all the resultant death and destruction was ultimately “good” for those living in the war zone. This is a man whose moral code permitted him to authorize the use of military force (including a massive bombing campaign meant to elicit psychological “shock” and “awe”) against a sovereign population of people without that population’s consent (nor much of the world’s consent for that matter). This man, the one who has untold thousands of bodies lying in his wake, is considered, to the present day, to have been acting justly throughout his military campaign and thus has remained free of formal punishment.
Yet, on the other hand, you have a man who has lived the reality of a war-torn nation first-hand; who has no army or bodyguards to do his bidding; who has felt the weight of a foreign President’s policies on he and his family’s psyches; who has utilized his shoes as his means of “shock” and “awe”— it is this man that the Iraqi justice system (which, one might say, is strongly influenced by the U.S.’s “restructuring” efforts) deemed fit for punishment. It is the man whose actions resulted in no death or injury; the man whose actions were motivated by compassion for those harmed by the brutal violence; the man whose actions earned the sanction of the citizens of Iraq, who spoke on their behalf—it is this man who is deemed morally inferior, and thus sentenced to prison by the prevailing moral code.
The man who used bombs and guns to negotiate his terms is, in the eyes of this perverse moral system, the moral superior and thus remains free of prison (and worthy of a President’s “retirement” package nonetheless). This is the morality of not only the Iraqi “justice” system, but, it is sad to say, also the morality of the government who had recognized George W. Bush as their President—the government who sanctioned his policies. Under this kind of moral system, bombs and guns are benign, whereas rubber and leather are lethal.
But, perhaps, it is not a matter of what one actually does that defines the moral correctness of their actions, but rather who one is while doing it—a sort of moral elitism. Since Mr. Zeidi was a civilian, a reporter, a “nobody,” his actions, no matter what they happened to be, were simply predisposed to moral wrongness, and thus were easy to punish. Mr. Bush, however, as a President, as a Commander in Chief, as an elite; well, he’s simply immune from moral wrongness due to his elevated social status. So long as morality is defined by status, then those of elite social status will always be morally superior to those of negligible social status. This is supposedly “justice.” This is also why it is utter bullshit.