Being Bad: Iraqi Edition

So, today the media is announcing that Muntader al-Zaidi has been released from prison. And that he alleges torture, both by Iraqi forces and U.S. intelligence agents. I have no idea of such allegations are true, of course, but I don’t think any rational person would be surprised. I am glad the guy got out of prison alive. I am also saddened by the possibility of torture. My remark here, though, is not about al-Zaidi’s case or the problem of torture in our various wars. Rather, I wonder about all of those people who found his case funny and edifying a year or so ago.

You see, I was struck immediately by the jokey response amongst American lefties – of which I am a far-wing member – after al-Zaidi threw he shoes at then-President Bush. So many people emailed around laughing remarks, started a Facebook.com “Fan Page” on “the shoe throwing guy,” and so on. It was as if his shoe throwing provided the catharsis many of us yearned for. By getting his, perhaps we could get ours, however vicariously. That’s a basic human thing. It makes literature and film work. It makes storytelling important. We respond to others when they act out – with outrage or sympathy or catharsis or whatever – and our own longings and needs get a slightly detoured outlet or satisfaction. He threw his shoe and scared and humiliated a president so many of us despised. Isn’t that funny?

I got so many “invitations” to al-Zaidi’s “Fan Page” on Facebook.

But I never said yes. Not because I think Facebook.com is anything other than a hobby and distraction, not because I think I’m above rooting for political actors in fairly ironic cyberspaces, but because it seemed grotesque to identify and outlet our own anxieties in al-Zaidi’s case. When I read about the shoe-throwing incident, I felt great fear for the man’s life. You can’t do that kind of thing without severe consequences, even under normal circumstances. Just try it at Obama’s next press conference. The “shoe-thrower” (he rarely got named as a person, but rather as a symbol alone) acted in a terrifying context. In the moral anarchy of the U.S. war in Iraq, who would expect anything short of torture? I feared he would die under “suspicious” circumstances. He didn’t and now he’s free. Now he can, I hope, tell his story.

The other, albeit secondary story that needs to be told is the story of how so many Americans took self-righteous pleasure in what would become another man’s extreme suffering. Building our catharsis on another man’s risk of body and life. In that way, how so many Americans repeated the very use of brown, foreign bodies in order to feel better about their world – the very thing of which G.W. Bush and his administration have been (rightly) accused after invading Afghanistan and Iraq after 11 September 2001. That repetition of use, which to my knowledge occasioned no apologies or expressions of regret, does not show that lefties are as bad as righties. Or maybe it does. I guess I’d just like to say this: the repetition of the use of brown, foreign bodies shows just how deeply seated the colonial gaze is in the Western, privileged world. And how vigilant and self-critical we have to be in order to avoid it.