Taming of the Shoe

Who throws a shoe? I mean really. You've got the old man sitting there, he's on a show called 'Q and A' which means if you ask him a question he has to answer it. You could have asked him anything you want. You could've stayed up the night before and concocted a question so pointed, so insightfully lancing, that the boil on the arse of society that is this old man would have burst live on national television. There would have been applause in the yawning gap between the end of your verbal bullet and the stammery spluttering answer of a man defeated by the weight of your profound inquiry.

Instead you threw a shoe.

You didn't even throw it well.

And to ask the prompt return of your shoes following their rather loopy expedition across the room in the general direction of John Winston Howard just smacks of lameness. It was kind of sad, like you just realised "I needed those shoes, I really did."

I'm sure people will talk about whether such acts are an effective protest, maybe they are sometimes. Certainly when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at then US President George W. Bush (a far better exhibition of shoe throwing in my opinion), he captured the growing frustration of a great deal of people with the war, the death and the injustice of it all. It was part of a greater debate about the war, it was at an extreme sure, but it was not isolated.

Throwing shoes at Howard however, three years out of power while he's attempting to protect his legacy on the ABC, does not achieve anything in my mind. In fact, I think Howard would find such an act far easier to deal with than a well-worded question addressing the many, many issues of the Iraq war. The nature of the act allowed Howard to dismiss it, and the reasons for it. It put the audience on his side and the protestor was roundly booed by other members of the audience, including fellow Howard detractors. What we're all reading today is 'man throws shoes at Howard', not 'David Hicks questions Howard on Guantanamo' or 'Howard defends actions in middle east'. Those are better things to be talking about than the merits of throwing footwear at former leaders.

Hell, I've seen more commentary on the quality of this guy's shoe-throwing ability than I have anything on the Howard book's defence of the war. The protestor said he wanted international attention to make his point known. He'd failed before the first shoe dropped.