Getting Shoed On

By: Sadiqua Hamdan and Badia Ead

Shoes are thrown at people for different reasons. If you were born in a Middle Eastern family, it’s tradition to have a shoe thrown at you when you are between the ages of 5 and 80. Research indicates that the risk of getting one thrown at you goes down as your age goes up.

Former President Bush was recently the recipient of this cultural “gift” from an Iraqi news reporter. It was more like a random act of “shoe-on-you, Mr. George”. A big ordeal was made out of this incident, and it brought embarrassment and mockery to him. I will explain why this was really a form of “I’m doing you a favor. I don’t want you to repeat the same mistakes when you get older” lesson. It’s tough love.

First, let’s talk about the history and purpose of throwing shoes.

Cultural Awareness

Like PMS, the gift of the “shoe throwing” gene has been passed on from great grandmother to her daughter, and so on. Of course, any person in an Arab family has the ability to throw a shoe, but tradition states that “one must be a grandfather, father, grandmother, mother, or making a lot of money before one is allowed to throw a shoe at another household member.”

Purpose of Shoe Throwing

As you may have already guessed, shoe throwing is a form of discipline. Everyone knows that Arab men work many hours and it’s up to the women to keep their kids in line. Over the years, mothers have fine-tuned their ability to throw with precision, speed and when you least expect it!

The precision is especially admired when the target is stricken running outside of a straight line. Long thought by experts to be a proven measure of thwarting an attack, i.e. gun shots, the Arab mother has perfected the art of hitting their moving target running in zig-zags.

It is also common knowledge that the number of shoes thrown is directly related to the ratio of mother to child. For example, any more than three children involved in the debacle will exponentially increase the number of shoes thrown in their direction. In this case, the old adage “strength in numbers” supports the number of shoes and not the number of children.

Anthropologists are not entirely certain when this practice began, but they theorize it was perfected some time before the emergence of the cordless telephone. It is believed that at this time, the mothers were forced to discipline within the boundaries of the telephone cord. Once removing the shoe and chasing the target with it ceased to be affective, the shoes began to fly.

There are many forms of discipline, like the fathers’ favorite, “It-foo” or “fake spitting on you”. It-foo really translates into, “I can’t believe you did that (insert silly reason why you pissed off your dad here). I can’t believe your mother gave birth to you and you are acting like a son-of-a-donkey.” Later in life, the therapist tells you that this is the Middle Eastern way of saying, “I’m disappointed in your actions, son.”

Other forms of verbal chastisement involve more of a self loathing approach, with the father exclaiming, “Damn your father!” and the mother exclaiming, “Damn your mother!” This usually causes confusion on the receivers’ end, who questions this approach before finally succumbing to the temptation to mock the parent for doing so. This, in turn, earns a thrown shoe.

So it brings us back to why shoes?

Shoes, sandals, pumps are easy to access. They’re usually on your feet. You reach down, pick up, and throw. It’s that easy. If your mom is really upset and throws a “foul” the first time, the other sandal is a foot away. She will hit the target. Her arm just wasn’t warmed up the first time, or she was being generous with a warning.

Now, the first time a shoe is thrown at you, it’s typically a situation you had no idea you were about to get into –you didn’t see it coming. I mean, your mom is in the bathroom dumping out the bucket of grayish colored water and replacing it with clean water to finish “Operation Clean Kitchen Floor” and you walk across that floor with dirty shoes on…very quickly…to grab some chocolate pudding out of the fridge. You have every intention of staying out of her way, so you head towards the living room to relax. A couple of minutes later, a sandal comes flying at you and hits you in your right shoulder. “Akhhh!” That means “OUCH!” Supplementing that action is a series of words that make you feel like you’re about to be pudding.

When Bush had a shoe thrown at him, it was the reporter’s way of saying, “Hi step-brother. Long time no see George Abdul Bush. I’m sorry our father insisted on sending you to boarding school for four years, but you repay us by shaming the family? You expect us to roll out the red carpet during this visit? How could you even think to give support to those our bullies? You were not raised this way.”Bush instinctively knew something was coming at him, and was able to dodge the dose of “tough love” thrown at him. Luckily, he thought it was kind of funny.

We hope he learned his lesson.