Professional Embarrassment

I am pleased that Fr33 Agents picked up my blog post from Wednesday, “Uh Oh:  Or Why I, too, am Specifically a Voluntaryist.” It espoused the radical thesis that violence is bad, and it’s reassuring to learn that there’s still an audience for such sentiments.  Also, I’m sure that increasing the readership of this blog means that tyranny will crumble!!

So maybe the attentive reader will think it contradictory that I support Mutadhar al-Zaidi, more popularly known as the Iraqi who threw his shoes at former president Bush.  He has recently been released from prison, and reportedly torture.  He justifies his actions here:

Why I Threw My Shoes At Bush | | AlterNet.

What compelled me to confront is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

And how it wanted to crush the skulls of (the homeland’s) sons under its boots, whether sheikhs, women, children or men. And during the past few years, more than a million martyrs fell by the bullets of the occupation and the country is now filled with more than 5 million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. And many millions of homeless because of displacement inside and outside the country.

Some would just say to themselves, “Hrm.  A million dead.  Well, still, we’re talking about an assembly of men in suits.  In the company of a murderer in a suit, we’re supposed to act civilized.  Besides, in the U.S., we have more important things to worry about, like ramming a new healthcare plan down everyone’s throats, in spite of the objections of millions.  Millions who, by the looks of things, probably wouldn’t be above throwing a shoe or two, or speaking in a Southern accent. And if people start throwing shoes at one suit they don’t like, what will they do to the new suit in charge, who we happen to favor?”

In other words, most people who ridicule the shoe throwing, or perhaps Joe Wilson, are not acting on a principled objection to violence.  They’re appalled at the breach of professional etiquette; or, as I’ve written before, the greater sin is not to be a war criminal, but to be rough of speech. It just isn’t good form to throw footwear in a professional setting, when a Head of State is speaking and the assembled are expected to politely defer.

Though our reality shows might indicate otherwise, I think Americans on the whole are uncomfortable with the display of unbecoming emotions.  At root that was the substance of al-Zaidi’s attack, since it was mostly a symbolic resistance, not an armed one:  he was publicly mourning, and Americans are terribly uncomfortable with that.  As al-Zaidi says:

Dozens, no, hundreds, of images of massacres that would turn the hair of a newborn white used to bring tears to my eyes and wound me. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Fallujah, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. In the past years, I traveled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and hear with my own ears the screams of the bereaved and the orphans. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

I support al-Zaidi in part because I am a voluntaryist who supports the Non-Aggression Principle, but do not, at least as of this writing, subscribe to pacifism.  That is, Bush had clearly aggressed, and al-Zaidi made a gesture of self-defense:

After six years of humiliation, of indignity, of killing and violations of sanctity, and desecration of houses of worship, the killer comes, boasting, bragging about victory and democracy. He came to say goodbye to his victims and wanted flowers in response.

But mostly I support him because, as always, we are holding a private actor to unreasonably harsh standards of “professionalism” and etiquette, while giving whole institutions a free pass in criminality.  Al-Zaidi notes that compromised journalism is hardly without precedent:

I take this opportunity: If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I wish to apologize to you for any embarrassment I may have caused those establishments. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day.

History mentions many stories where professionalism was also compromised at the hands of American policymakers, whether in the assassination attempt against Fidel Castro by booby-trapping a TV camera that CIA agents posing as journalists from Cuban TV were carrying, or what they did in the Iraqi war by deceiving the general public about what was happening. And there are many other examples that I won’t get into here.

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