Would you offer your daughter to Bush's shoes-thrower?

It’s what farting is to American comedies. You know the script writers have already run out of their already thin ideas when the backsides start to crackle and trumpet.

It’s throwing your tomatoes at the curtains after the bungled, boring show is over, or your naartjies at the rugby field after a poor performance but the players you supported have already skulked off, heads hung in shame.

Or the solitary ballerina pirouetting on the stage in the silence before the gulf of empty auditorium seats; the orchestra has long ago sent its last skirls of kisses into the audience as they, enrapt, but at times disappointed, watched the ballet. She stumbled several times in the show but now, alone, she is skimming and skating across the stage in a flawless weave. Perhaps a tear should now stain her cheek; perhaps a wry, “I’ll come back” smile could sweeten her lips.

And so forth.

George W., in retirement from his stage is surely going to rewind and play repeatedly his “if only I hads …” or “what if I’d instead …”

I never thought George W. could get me attempting to write poetry, or at least lyrics along the lines of Alainis Morisette’s Isn’t It Ironic — an old favourite of mine — not least because she does not understand the word ironic. An old man who turned 98 and won the lottery and died the next day is not ironic. It has a sad, “life’s a bitch” feel to it, but it is not irony.

So. A pair of shoes thrown at the face of “W”, poor old Bush. Tut tut. Or so he is re-imagined as the hapless victim in the recent Hollywood documentary re-make of Bush II, poor old George the man. The man we can all get away with making a buffoon of, caricaturising a person who is already a caricature … now gets further caricatured. He is only worthy of a pair of flung shoes, which in a moment (perhaps … just perhaps with a hint of irony), became worth ten million dollars as at least one Saudi businessman offered ten million dollars US for the shoes.

But will Muntadhar al-Zaidi receive that money or the confiscators of the unlaced missiles? Oh, I am sure that Saudi billionaire will try to ensure Muntadhar does, but who is going to relinquish the shoes unless they get some kind of reward? Thus, the ultimate insult in Islam, throwing your shoes at someone, is reduced or inflated to mere material greed. No doubt the shoes could be sold again for a lot more, provided they are burnished and housed in an altar-like glass case. Economics dwarfs politics, or is politics, and subverts morality.

No doubt Baydan Shoe Company, the manufacturers of the “Bush shoe” will see huge orders coming in, and they will enjoy a bit of financial sunshine in the global gloom.

But Bush has, in essence, left the stage.
W. makes his lame joke, his knowledge that the flung shoes are size ten. Ha ha. His repartee, his final tours and bows to the world are meaningless, Macbeth’s tale told by an idiot, as we all happily agree, thus making friends of us all.

Yet, perhaps ironically enough, this, one of his last events as president brings to question the timeless issue of morality.

The businessman Saad Gumaa offered al-Zaidi his daughter (and thus, we are also to intimate, her body) and contacted Dergham, Zaidi the Mighty Shoe Thrower’s brother, to tell him of the offer. “I find nothing more valuable than my daughter to offer to him, and I am prepared to provide her with everything needed for marriage,” Saad is quoted as saying.

His twenty-year-old daughter is reported to have said, “This is something that would honour me. I would like to live in Iraq, especially if I were attached to this hero.”

Note the lexical set: honour … valuable … hero … all gems on the diamond necklace of morality and valued by most of us, here said in the context of offering a woman’s body to a stranger (relatively speaking). And if al-Zaidi had been a woman? Would some businessman or businesswoman have offered her son?

Would you offer your daughter to the shoe-thrower? What does that make of you if you did? What are we to make of you?

I have never had children, though I have taught kids for twenty years and have become attached to many, and they to me. I have two delightful Chinese god-daughters, Star and Sunshine, both aged 22 now, who adopted me in China. They kind of took me over, essentially nearly four years ago, when one day early on, they both realised we were actually quite lonely and had no one to speak to: we were surrounded by largely non-English speaking Chinese and had not found fellow foreigners yet.

When I go visit them in faraway Shaoxing in China, where we first lived on coming to China, Sunshine is fond of tucking her arm in mine and I proudly walk along the street, grinning like a sunlit toad. They both call me Dad and mean it. Sunshine’s real father is never around. Star never speaks of hers. I don’t ask; and I know they have little by way of material means. We have a wonderful relationship. As little as they have, they love trying to give us gifts, take delight in the simplest of things.

And so forth. “Chinese chicken soup for the soul”, my readers by now may be muttering, but I could never offer, or even dream of offering them to any shoe-thrower or any man for that matter. To do so is a question of morality, or is it not?

Surely a parent asks, “Will the potential husband look after my daughter?”
“Sure he is good at throwing shoes, and at the right targets, but will he provide? Will he respect the precious produce of my and my wife’s flesh, hearts and souls? Think of those two decades we spent providing for her, educating her, so that she could come to this pass.”

Why is the father, Saad Gumaa really doing this? He and his daughter have certainly got themselves into the media, one has to cynically observe. Women are still seen (the word “still” signalling this will alter and needs to alter, I suppose) as a form of barter in the far East, or the Middle East and other parts of the globe.

When I was in Israel some years ago there was a lady with stunning blue eyes in our tour group, and another with blond hair. Both were highly sought after by Arab men and numbers of cattle and other forms of dowry were seriously offered for them … and their bodies. All because they had the rare, flame-like jewellery of blue eyes and golden hair. We in the tour laughed incredulously; even those cosmopolitan, sought-after ladies did, though of course their cheeks and necks tinged with rose. But since when do I occupy the higher moral ground?

At least the computer game, throwing shoes at images of Bush, the first version of which was released the very next day after those Ducati shoes became famous, has no morals attached to it; this is the most hilarious, eye-catching talked-about event of the week or perhaps the year:Bush and those shoes. So why not cash in on a computer game? No harm done to any human. So morality implies the way people, or at least living things, are viewed, valued and used.

And the most valuable item we have to offer, of course, is our bodies. If you own me, surely I have nothing left. All I am is yours.

The human race has a long history of body givers or sacrificers, from Abraham’s sacrifice of his son to daily prostitution. Abraham’s sacrifice is generally regarded by theologians and philosophers as the temporary, teleological suspension of the ethical, the giving of one mere mortal for the common, universal good.

One of the most amusing and most interesting examples of body-giving of recent times for the “universal good” has been the infamous or famous (depending on how you work your morals or how your morals have worked you) lady who has been both a porn star and an Italian politician, Ilona Staller, better known as la Cicciolina.

When the first George Bush was around, she offered her body to Saddam Hussein:
“I am ready to make love with Saddam Hussein to restore peace in the Middle East …” Her body became a form of morality, a kind of erotic sacrifice which sounds so much better in the husky, lip-pouting, musical French from which the above quotation is translated:
“Je suis prête à faire l’amour avec Saddam Hussein afin de rétablir la paix au Moyen-Orient …”

Oh wow, oh wow … so Saddam could have still been around, a rehabilitated butcher or hero (depending again on your … fill in the missing word, which will tell us more about yourself, your morals) with a satisfied grin on his face in exchange for a night or twelve in the hay with a French-born beauty.

La Cicciolina offered her body to Saddam again in 2002, repeatedly so. The man was a fool. He didn’t have to lose his head about it.

I am starting to think of morality as I inevitably would end up thinking it to be: poetically, instead of discursively. Think of the abstractness, the austere strait-lacedness referred to by the “M” word as a tough fruit, or at least a fruit with a tough skin, say a fig or a litchee. You think its hard until you rupture it skin and its juiciness pours out, gushes against the singing palate.

So morality is there to be fondly questioned and examined: banged with a hammer, cut with a knife to lets its true nature come out. Off with our narrow-minded paradigms, our masks!

I used to often use the South African exclamation jislaaik as a twenty- something man. I had some Christian friends who would glare at me accusingly and stiffly. You are blaspheming the name of the Lord, they’d say. (Jislaaik is perhaps a corruption in Afrikaans of “for Jesus’ sake”.) Bewildered and a bit peed off, I tried to stop, but realised what my Christian friends were about, which they had not realised. They showed they were hurt, offended, by my use or misuse of a mere sound that was emitted from my lips, jislaaik, with no blasphemous intent behind it. It somehow showed them to be deeply spiritual, deeply moral. Of course, far more so than me. But, as I pointed out to them, deep down inside they were enjoying their offense, their hurt. Which implied their morals were not real.

Yes, rupture the morals, bring them into question, respecting them at the same time. I do know that when I thought of La Cicciolina, I was inspired by her idea of giving her body to Saddam Hussein. What if a woman like her had gone into Iraq and seduced the butcher, the hero?

So I sat down and wrote a novel about that, using a fictional country, Qu’arti, almost an anagram of Iraq. Some years later and one hundred and fifty one thousand words later, the book was finished, Flowers on Sappho’s Grave, and it was a wonderful process of self-discovery and life-questioning … what are morals?