Bush shoe incident stirs souls

THE George W Bush shoe-throwing incident has stirred souls and shaken soles worldwide, and Namibia is no exception.

Within hours of ‘shoegate’ making international headlines, SMSes about the US President and the Iraqi journalist were whizzing from cellphone to cellphone in Namibia.
Two of the most popular SMSes doing the rounds among Namibians are: ‘Bushoephobia – the fear of a shoe hurled at you by a journalist; an incurable anxiety attack’, and ‘Bushoessassin – a journalist-cum-assassin who hurls shoes at press briefings, preferably at presidents and top politicians’.
Jokes about newly coined words inspired by the shoe-throwing saga have even been hurled at Namibian journalists.
In cyber space, the incident has already drawn over eight million views on You Tube, an online video-sharing website, with uploads of the video reaching a high of 209 per hour.
Meanwhile, Muntadar al-Zeidi, the journalist who threw his size 10 shoes at the US President during a
press briefing in Baghdad, Iraq, on Sunday, has become something of a folk hero to many in his country.
Internationally the event has drawn mixed reactions, sparking both applause and shock.
Showing the sole of your shoe to someone, let alone throwing your shoes at them, is an extreme sign of disrespect in the Arab world.
There’s been no shortage of spoofs on the incident, which many Arabs across the Middle East have hailed as ‘a proper send-off to the unpopular US president’.
In the UK, a new online viral video game called ‘Bush’s Boot Camp’ has been designed, which places players in the role of an agent ‘tasked with protecting the president by shooting at a barrage of shoes’.
T-Enterprise, the creators of the game, quipped to the UK Telegraph yesterday that ‘we’re hoping the (security) agents will use this game as a training aid for future footwear attacks on world leaders’.
The incident has also served as a source of inspiration for sole-searching comedians, who have incorporated the incident into their acts.
According to US news reports, David Letterman was impressed by the president’s quick reactions, saying that ‘Bush hasn’t dodged anything like that since, well, the Vietnam War’; while Conan O’Brien says the shoe-thrower is being hailed as a hero by some in Iraq, adding that ‘when the man dies, he’ll be greeted in heaven by 72 podiatrists’.
Well-known boxing promoter Don King has also weighed in on the incident, describing Bush’s reflexes at dodging the shoes as ‘unbelievable’, and calling the president’s duck-and-move technique as ‘aggression but with protection’.
Bush is reported by the Associated Press to have seemed unfazed by the incident, sharing the size of the shoe with the audience, and saying that he would be thinking of ‘shoe jokes’ for a while.
* See also international section

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