Orientalism's Farewell Kiss

"Untied"
11x14 oil on canvas board

All politicians, if they are to experience any longevity in their chosen field, must effectively hone their ability at press conferences to duck and dodge the constant salvoes from self serving journalists. Last Sunday in Baghdad, President Bush took that skill set to a new level. So slick was he in avoiding those POTUS bound projectiles (size 10), that no less a purveyor of talent than Don King marveled at his nimble athletic reflexes. Yes, yes I know, the shoe flinging was intended as an extreme insult, and it played out as such to the Arab audience. But ...well, how can I put this? With all apologies to the culture police, it really looked rather buffoon-ish to us Occidentals.

I don’t know, maybe it just gets kind of lost in the translation. I suppose it is possible that we just don’t appreciate the profound and serious nature of airborne leather crafted footwear, but my guess is that rather than feeling insulted, most Americans feel as embarrassed for our Arab brethren as we were for our Soviet comrades when Khrushchev had his shoe-crazed moment at the UN a half century ago. You can’t think of Nikita today without the mental image of him exhorting the cohorts in his delegation to join him in banging his shoe on the desk in the General Assembly. In an odd sort of way, the Mother of All Insults on Baghdadiya TV was more reminiscent of Johnny Carson’s “Carnac the Magnificent” to American cable news audiences -chastising Ed McMahon with his curse, “May the fleas of one thousand camels infest your armpits”. It’s hard to be insulted while you’re stifling a chuckle (or a McMahon style chortle).

Perhaps its true, after all, that Western culture cannot possibly understand today’s Arab culture on anything close to a visceral level. Nothing illustrates that more clearly than a particular reaction to the shoe flinging incident. The flinger in question, Muntader al-Zaidi, was given an award for “courage” by Wa Attassimou, a Libyan group headed by Khaddafi’s daughter, Aicha. In looking over the list of finalists for this award, Aicha apparently was unimpressed with daily acts of valor that would command the respect and humble admiration of the average American citizen. True heroic bravery is ubiquitous in that struggling nation. No, Aicha Khadddafi (a lawyer who offered to defend Saddam Hussein after his capture, according to Reuters) chose to recognize the false bravado of an Iraqi Geraldo Rivera. She claimed he represented “a victory for human rights across the world.” Maybe. But it begs some obvious questions.

Foremost among them is, why, given Mr. al-Zaidi’s great intestinal fortitude, did he keep both shoes tightly laced and secured around his feet during the entirety of Saddam’s reign? Surely he must have been aware of Hussein’s appalling human rights record, even against his own people. As a television journalist, he surely would have at least googled “Halabja.” A well aimed wing tip in Saddam’s direction was certainly in order. That would have been a real act of courage - and it would have gotten him and his entire family murdered. Courage in the face of a reign of terror is rare. It creates a fear so powerful that it often leads to paralysis. The long nightmare of Saddam's reign of terror has been broken, which was made clear by the grandstanding of an Iraqi journalist. And the man largely responsible for breaking that reign by committing - rightly or wrongly - American lives and treasure was ducking a pair of shoes at a Baghdad press conference.

Seasons in the Sun

Indian Summer
oil on canvas panel

To the best of my recollection, it may have been at the tender academic level of third grade that I was introduced to the spinning orbs that comprise our local solar system. In the bigger picture, of course, the time that has passed since my experience years ago within the confines of the four walls of classroom 3A, is very small indeed – yet it is large enough to have distorted my understanding of some basic astrological facts. For example, I was set aright this week thanks to a kind of radio version of the daily almanac which informed the listening public last Wednesday that the earth would be at its perihelion, or its closest orbital position relative to the sun.

My thought was, “How can that be?” I knew about the elliptical shape of earth’s orbit and, since the frigid palm of Old Man Winter had been smacking me briskly about the face and ears, wouldn’t that indicate that earth was, in fact, at its farthest point along its orbit of the big Hot Potato? Actually, no. Surprisingly, the farthest point from the sun (the aphelion) will occur sometime during the sweltering days of July. As it turns out, the difference of three million miles doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, and the seasons are determined by the tilt of the earth’s axis as it spins. Tilting away from the sun brings the cold temps of winter, and when the earth works its way around to the opposite side of the big spud, its tilt toward the sun is what causes the noticeable degradation of my wife’s generally pleasant demeanor, exacerbated in direct relation to the mercurial climb along the inside of the thin glass tube of the thermometer.

I’ve been strangely enamored of late with the ritual dance of earth, moon and sun, but all that aside, my confusion over the perihelion thing brought home an obvious assertion that I’ve held to for some time - the unchanging nature of reality in relation to man’s varied and evolving belief systems.

Whether these belief systems are constructs rooted in philosophy, theology, or our understandings of the physical universe, radical shifts in the accepted views in these areas are ultimately rather meaningless. The earth did not morph from a flattened surface to a rounded sphere when man’s understanding acknowledged its true shape. Galileo did not cause the sun to suddenly stop in its tracks, thereby pulling the earth out of stagnation and into a sudden orbit around it (elliptical in nature and with its annual perihelion and aphelion stages). The very nature and existence of mankind or of our God does not rise nor fall with our varied descriptions, denials, or affirmations of same – whether right or wrong. All these remain unaffected. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.