When the shoes whizzed by President Bush at his farewell Iraq appearance, he either feigned or admitted ignorance that the act had a cultural significance to his hosts beyond a hurled object.
Somehow between the widely promulgated video of children beating the felled Sadaam statue with shoes, and the snarky revisiting of the prediction we'd have rose petals thrown at our feet, he missed grasping that all acts aren't literal.
Or maybe he knew very well, and was willing to play the fool to divert the insult by laughing it off, and this got me to thinking this might be a strength he can draw on as he spends the rest of his life trying to mop up his mess that was his presidency.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a video cartoon that featured a stereotypical mideastern terrorist villain who somehow landed at the stereotypical American farm. The barnyard antics that ensued had the terrorist and barnyard animals defying gravity, caroming off walls and ceilings.
At one point the terrorist landed with such force that he dug his own deep hole. He was followed closely, and the audio track suggested, subsequently landed upon deep in the hole by a huge pig.
I've thought about that scene almost every day since. What do the target audiences think? Do American judeo-christian-raised kids just think its crazy hijinks with familiar farm animals? How about the muslim kids?
My guess is that the significance of a probably-Muslim stereotypical mideastern terrorist being in a hole with a pig on top of him was probably lost on everybody but the wrong people. Maybe we can reverse-engineer this the way Bush is willing to play the shoe-toss and it can be another secret mea culpa as Bush43 struggles with history.
When the time comes for Bush to shuffle off this mortal coil, let's bury him with a big passel of Texas Bar-B-Que. The great unwashed will say, "ain't that sweet." But the ones we pissed off will say, "My god, he's buried with a pig!"