September 26, 2007
Customs
Walking around sox footed recently in the Halifax airport, I wondered whether the President of Iran had to go shoeless through customs like the rest of us. I remembered that Yasser Arafat was asked to hand over his six-shooter at his joint press conference with the president up at Camp David. But whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even had to go through customs when he came over was really not the point. (Although, if he did, he’d find that the Canadian customers must have gone to a better charm school than the New York crowd.)
That he came is what matters. I don’t know about him, but getting a chance to be interviewed by Christiane Amanpour would not be the least of my motives.
Nobody doubts that Ahmadinejad doesn’t have our best interests at heart or that he’s not alone on that subject or that he well may be lying through his teeth. Just keeping his image intact holding up his end of the Axis of Evil is hard enough. So it’s at some risk that he comes over here at all, especially with the crowds and their posters likening him to Hitler and their giving him only half the peace symbol and all.
But he came, whatever his motive. So he got lambasted by the president of Columbia University who from what was reported in the media apparently ain’t no slouch at castigating. At least he had a chance to answer with a tongue-lashing of his own and and go tieless if not shoeless to the United Nations. And believe you me, if that doesn’t beat suicide bombing and daily death reports and millions of refugees flooding out of Iraq and spending billions stuffing the pockets of the military-industrial complex and the foolishness of war in general, I don’t know what does. Even hostile communication beats no communication at all.
And then there’s that guy who flew over here with the fuse in his shoe and made me put my size 13s and all my hardware in those big plastic baskets. Wherever he is, I hope he bought Tupperware before all this got started.
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