By Tom Plate
A new trend in political protest seems to be emerging. The other day yet another shoe went flying in anger, aimed at bringing a prominent figure to heel. This time the setting was Istanbul, not Iraq. The target was the head of the powerful International Monetary Fund, not the president of the United States, as in the famous incident affronting George W. Bush last December. And the latest heel-hurler was a relatively powerless Turkish student, not an Iraqi journalist.
So what’s not to like?
Compared with terrorist bombs exploding in crowded cafés or hijacked passenger airplanes knifing into skyscrapers or an assassin’s bullet boring into a head of state, we can live with the occasional airborne sneaker or lofted loafer.
If we were more tolerant of shoe-throwers, there might be fewer suicide bombers. And so let’s applaud the cool response of International Monetary Fund Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who joked afterward that the shoe aimed at him actually revealed Turkish students to be decent blokes: “One thing I learned: Turkish students are polite. They waited until the end [of my speech] to complain."
The frustration of the Turks these days is well known. It is much the same as the frustration of Asians during that regional financial crisis (1997-99). The IMF is both good guy and bad guy: It is the lender that countries turn to when they need a lot of cash fast, but they resent the loan conditions. As if the scolding parent, the kid is grounded, the allowance is taken away, and life becomes grim as the Gulag.
Ten years ago some Asian countries, notably Malaysia, said no thanks to the IMF and went their own way to climb out of its crisis. Turkey would like to do that too, but over the years it has had to go to the IMF quite often. These have been tough decisions, but with each one the Turkish public more and more looks at the IMF like some Greek occupation force. In that atmosphere I’d probably be a testy Turk, too.
Not even the most mature and sophisticated of columnists are immune to the temptation to occasionally hurl a shoe at someone. My own list of current targets starts off with America’s top commander in Afghanistan for shooting off his mouth in a recent speech in London. It seems Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is against an Afghan pullback — wow, what a surprise!
Sorry, Herr General: It’s Barack Obama who has to make the difficult decision on whether to send more troops to troubled Afghanistan, or bring the boys and girls home over time. Why not let the president make his decision without such public pressure? A soft shoe for him.
There’s another top American commander that has been complaining in public lately, but in this occasion the officer is dead to rights. Adm. Timothy Keating says his office and staff lack direct phone contacts to their counterparts in the People’s Liberation Army in China in case of a Sino-U.S. misunderstanding or crisis. His is no new complaint: To supplement the Washington-Beijing hotline, the U.S. Pacific Command has long wanted a speed-dial list of PLA generals and admirals ever since the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1996.
They are right to want it, but China’s generals have not been good about giving it. In this dispute we’d thus aim our shoe at the Chinese brass.
One also has another question for China. Its 60th anniversary celebration of Communist Party rule the other day was chockablock full with goose-stepping troops and swooping fighter jets. At the center of all the martial merriment was President Hu Jintao. He is the latest Chinese maximum leader to lead his mere 1.4 billion people further away from a communist economy and ever more deeply into a kind of mixed capitalism.
Given this otherwise reassuring policy direction, please explain why President Hu, whose public appearances usually show him decked out in standard business suit, had to don a cranky old gray high-collared Mao jacket for this occasion? it couldn’t be because he has only one Western business suit in his wardrobe, and it’s at the cleaners. I may be making too big a deal over sartorial symbolism, but the sight of the Mao jacket fired up the shoe-hurling Turk in me. But that is as far as I or anyone should go. Let’s leave it at the shoe level.
This article ran in The Providence Journal on October 8, 2009.
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