I'm taking a few vacation days this week, and I'll only blog intermittently until the end of the year. But even though I haven't seen a television since Friday afternoon, of course I got the video Sunday afternoon, via e-mail, of Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi firing his shoes at President Bush. It's really the only news that's made it through my vacation filter.
If I weren't on vacation, I might be debating whether his action was appropriate. Journalists should not throw shoes. But from my vacation perch, there was some weird karmic, cosmic and even darkly comic justice in the flying shoes. They weren't bombs, they weren't bullets. I mostly believe in nonviolence, but I wonder if shoe-throwing might be at the outermost edge of nonviolence, especially when faced with the man who fecklessly began an awful war that's killed many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Maybe I'll see it differently when I'm back at my desk, but I hope not.
I'll pop up again occasionally through the holidays, but I'm not blogging regularly again until the new year.
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