Tag Archives: iraq

The Emperor’s New Clothes
(or Bil Kundara* America)
*a threatening remark involving the potential use of a shoe

By Vi Ransel

12/18/08

Our strutting, imperial president
paid his farewell visit to Iraq
where he appeared with puppet, Nouri al-Maliki,
not expecting to find himself under attack.

He stood in front of the world’s TV cameras
and pontificated at a press conference podium
“The work hasn’t been easy, but it’s been necessary” he said,
thus exposing America as the world’s moral colon

with this flippant dismissal of four million refugees
and the destruction of an entire society,
the erasure of the beginnings of Western Civilization
and the taking of more than a million Iraqi lives

by means of his aggressive and illegal war
on a non-threatening, essentially unarmed nation.
And then Bush got as close as he’d ever come
to confronting the reality of one of his failures.

As this genocidal, sociopathic Upper Class Twit
was doing a rhetorical backstroke in Iraqi blood,
he was given a final and fitting tribute
in the universal language of television.

A young, Iraqi journalist introduced him
to one of the Middle East’s most well-known customs
which exposed the indecency of George W. Bush
like Joe Welch did to McCarthy and his Commission.

While world journalists still refuse to ask the questions
which would skewer Bush with his own callous charade,
he stood up and with the courage of his convictions
threw his shoes into George W. Bush’s smug face.

He yelled “Ya kalb!” calling Bush “You Dog!”
treating the occupier to a souvenir of his “victory”,
not a shower of flowers from grateful Iraqis,
but a shower of shoes from Muntather al-Zaidi.

This is the farewell kiss, you dog.
This is a gift from the Iraqis, he went on.
This is from those who were killed in Iraq,
from the injured, the widows and the orphans.

Bush ducked the first shoe and in seconds
Muntather had fired off the other
aimed just above Bush’s head, it hit the American flag,
and brought a whole new meaning to the term “shoe bomber”.

In most Middle Eastern countries, the shoe
is seen as an object of dirt, pollution and disrespect
and can be used to insult or to denigrate someone
and millions the world over share the same contempt

for this miserable, draft-dodging chicken hawk
who’s conducted a War of Terror and stunning atrocities
from the distant safety of his Washington Offal Office
for eight years and made it seem like eternity.

And while protected by billions in military technology,
still he stood exposed, not as emperor, but as fool,
and he proved he was no match for a man without a weapon,
armed with only the truth and two of his shoes.

Overnight Muntather al-Zaidi became
one of the most beloved people on the face of the earth,
and even in America the man who humiliated the president
is more popular than the president himself.

Please go to http://www.uruknet.info and click on either “Sacred Shoe” or “The Hero Who Made Bush’s Head a Playground for His Shoes” to sign a petition for the release of this courageous young man. Thank you. Thanks also to Layla Anwar for the term “bil kundara” and its definiton.

Poet and part-time actor Viola Ransel is a Senior Contributing Editor with CJO.