shoes and sleeplessness

I relapsed into consciousness, unfortunately, much earlier than necessary this morning, around 5am. (Fighting off consciousness has been an ongoing battle this fall, as I’ve been unable to sleep through nights. I’m reminded of one person’s particular take on vampires and their need to die and retreat underground for a few decades once every few centuries to get their head together; but I’ll leave vampire analogies for another post.)

I’d been dreaming of a local band that had written a song about how they shared their laptop with a certain Bay Area nonprofit organization; they were playing the song (one particularly line, “we share a computer…” delivered with overwrought emotion) in some performance space on the top floor of a tall office building, glass windows all around. I was laughing, unlike the other audience members, since I understood that the song was intended to be funny—

The weather outside was rainy and icy—

And that’s where consciousness and unconsciousness, sadly, melded, and I was suddenly awake, hearing the icy rain outside the window. Or it sounds like it to me, and thoroughly possible, given the oddness of the weather this decade. (earlier, or last night, rather, around 11pm, I was treated to the rare sound of real, actual rolling thunder. The sound of rolling thunder, for chrissake, in San Francisco. Beauty to my east coast ears, now far too many days out of the year removed from seasonal extremes.)

Anyway. After much trying to return to sleep, after much anxiety creeping to the front of my brain—I’m awake, why not make it an unpleasant wakefulness?—I finally got up and sent some emails. Feeling nothing if immensely unsatisfied, and remembering the story of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. at a news conference in Baghdad on Sunday.

I’d first heard about it because one of my friends who’s ever mini-blogging via her gchat status (and, undoubtedly, via twitter, facebook, and any and all other avenues of mini-bloggery) had posted the then cryptic line “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!”

Perhaps, it was simply “this is the farewell kiss, you dog!”

Anyway, a few hours later I saw the actual article on the NYT website, describing in greater length what had happened. Soon there were references to the event all over the internets; I was even receiving emails from people who wanted to share the story. I think the general feeling was that it was funny, and demonstrated the ultimate “fuck you” to Bush; a good example of him getting yet another comeuppance.

In reading the article, I found myself feeling (1) a vague sense of satisfaction, heavily tinged & diluted with some regret for all that’s happened that caused a respected journalist, Montader Al-Zaidi, to throw his shoes at bush, and regret that bush is still president and still representing the country, although not for much longer; (2) grudging pity for Bush, his bewilderment giving way to grins & joke-cracking about the incident as Zaidi was dragged away; (3) horror over the way Zaidi was treated immediately after; and (4) appreciation for the irony of one of Bush’s jokes (“That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves”) as Zaidi was being beaten just meters away, causing him to scream and add some nice background noise for the remainder of the press conference, I suppose.

Anyway, a bit more detail on what prompted (3) above, which has proved to be the most indelible-in-brain:

Mr. Maliki’s security agents jumped on the man, wrestled him to the floor and hustled him out of the room. They kicked him and beat him until “he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki. Mr. Zaidi was then detained on unspecified charges.

Other Iraqi journalists in the front row apologized to Mr. Bush, who was uninjured and tried to brush off the incident by making a joke. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside.

Watching the video on the NYT website (the ones I’ve seen on youtube, so far, don’t really include as much of the aftermath, and cut off soon after the actually shoe-throwing) gives more of a sense of a scene that has proved to be far less amusing than it is unsettling and deeply disturbing. Link to full article here.