It Won't Be Long 'Til I'll Be Tying On My Flying Shoes

As good as it might have felt at the time, and as much as Helen Thomas may have wished she'd thought of it first, I am going to have to come out in opposition to the act of throwing one's shoes at the President. He may well deserve it, and it does call to mind one of the funnier stand-up routines by Eddie Murphy, but I can't help but think it will take our country in the wrong direction, particularly in regard to civil liberties.

If the reaction to the shoe-throwing is anything like the reaction to other acts ranging in severity from civil disobedience to outright terrorism, the response will be a reduction in the number of places where I can peaceably wear footwear.

Places Where One Is Expected To Remove One's Shoes (or Soon Will Be):

1. The airport.
2. The homes of certain Japanese people.
3. The homes of people with new carpeting (or, more likely, a weird fascination with peoples' feet)
4. The pre-toddler room at day care.
5. Presidential press conferences.

Here's the thing: I hate taking my shoes off. I like to wear lace-up shoes, and if you're going to have your laces good and tight, you can't just slip shoes on and off, which means you've got to spend some time untying both shoes, loosing the laces, getting the feet out, etc. This involves either kneeling, usually in a doorway or in a line leading to a metal detector, or bracing yourself against someone's shoulder like a sweaty Bruce Springsteen loping around the neck of Clarence Clemmons on the record sleeve of Born To Run or trying to keep balance, stork-like, on one foot. Being a bigger guy, it is not always an easy thing to get my feet to where my hands can get at them. So I feel like it's an awful lot of work to take off my shoes for some small and insignificant reason like, say, flying to California or asking a question of the President.

Also, feet are kind of nasty. They're pale and callused and yellow in parts, and they smell and collect sock lint and, thousands of years ago, they were hands. Gross.

(By the way, several of today's news reports have revealed that throwing your shoe at a person is considered an insult in Muslim cultures. Thanks for that, press corps. If this is the sort of work you've been doing instead of throwing your shoes at the president, you might have found other things to do with your time.)

Just as people largely stopped using commercial airplanes once they had to take off their shoes to do so, now people are going to stop asking news-type questions of their president. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that the threat of having their patriotism challenged prevented the press from asking hard questions about the run-up to Iraq, and now -- or at least for the next 35 days -- they'll be too busy getting their shoes on and off to notice the last-minute fire sale on democracy.

(Post title by Townes VanZandt, my near namesake.)