Column

For a man of his age, and given that his low attention span is now the stuff of legend, George W Bush showed astonishing reflexes when the Iraqi journalist hurled shoes at him in a press conference in Baghdad last week. Why, he even managed a wan smile followed by a weak wisecrack to show that while he may have been nonplussed he was, well, not going to finish in the minus where the public relations impact of the event was concerned.

Having watched replays of that incident several times, and lived off such writing for more than 30 years, I can’t resist the temptation to apply a cricketing perspective to it. Ask any batsman. To sway out of the line of a missile hurled at you from a short distance requires not just keen reflexes, but high skill and a robust instinct for survival.

Suffice to say that even Sunil Gavaskar in his prime — with his immaculate technique against bouncers, beamers et al — couldn’t have done it better than George W Jr. I suppose eight years at the helm of American politics and being widely regarded as the most powerful man in the world primes you up for such exigencies, though critics will argue that the crux of the shoe-throwing incident was not so much a show of skill by George W Jr as the extremely low credibility he now commands in the world.

“Can there be a worse insult than shoes being hurled at you in the very country you claim to have released from tyranny?” asked someone I met last week. “Muntadhar al-Zaidi (the journalist) got his intention right but his aim all wrong,” said another. “His aim was okay, but shoe was too small sized,” said a third. None of these three is obviously a great fan of the American president and had no compunction in teaming up with al-Zaidi — in spirit if not in person — in expressing their disgust. I suspect that this sentiment has greater universal appeal than has been portrayed publicly. While the shoe-hurling incident has earned deep opprobrium too, the applause (symbolically) appears to have been far in excess if one goes by the exchange of views in the political sphere — in drawing and dressing rooms, blogosphere, here, there and everywhere.

At a personal level, I must admit that I could never think of hurling a shoe at anybody, leave aside president of a country. You could blame this on my mother who rapped my knuckles till they turned blue if I so much as hurled even a fluffy ball in the house and hit somebody by mistake. People of my generation will understand the everlasting roles mothers played in such matters. More importantly, it requires an acute sense of dismay to be provoked into drastic action as defined by al-Zaidi, which I frankly don’t have.

I would imagine that if your country is invaded on some silly pretext of finding WMDs and wreaking unrelated havoc instead, it can become unbearable to the degree that you are moved to an act of derring-do without concern for personal safety. Add to this several other acts of commission that have made the Bush era (with not a little help from lunatics like Osama bin Laden) symptomatic of the colourful Wild West as we have come to know from American comic books — except that where we find ourselves now as a human race is certainly no laughing matter.

So, while I do admire George W Bush’s aplomb in evading the shoes hurled at him last week, I am not sure if posterity will judge him similarly. His party shooed out of the presidency last month and the president himself shoed out of what he believed was his biggest victory last week. History has an unkind way of making it impossible to duck some things, whatever the size of the shoe, as it were.

And finally, apropos the stink raised by Mr Abdul Rahman Antulay in Parliament which has put the Congress in a pickle of sorts, I have a simple query: Everybody knows that the law can be an ass. But even barristers-at-law?