gestures

It seems the world has entered an age of pathetic gestures. Look around and you see more and more efforts by individuals or nations to make some supposedly important point, only to end up looking pathetically banal.

1. SHOE THROWER - If the guy hadn't been frisked and 'wanded', he probably would have carried in an AK-47 and blown away half the room. That would have been a notable achievement. Yes, he's become famous for his stunt, but to what end? Now he's bound for jail with several broken bones, his target is none the worse for wear and in fact bragging about his own magnanimity, and the whole incident has become a joke along lines the thrower evidently did not intend.

2. THE ISLAMIC MOBS - who are roaming the streets in far-flung cities brandishing shoes and signs and lionizing the show-thrower. These mobs will turn up at any incident from anti-Mohammed cartoons to the most recent shooting by an Israeli. And the effect? Nil.

3. GEORGE BUSH'S VICTORY TOUR - What could be more pointless than this trip to Iraq and Afghanistan? The man has fouled the nests of half the world, and now in his insistence that he's really a decent well-meaning fella, he's wandering around from military audience to military audience preening and crowing like a rooster who just got his diminutive rocks off. No one is buying this charade except possibly Rush Limbaugh, and historians are already lining up to laugh at him.

4. THE RUSSIAN NAVY - has been moving about the Caribbean, showing up in the ports-of-call of any country that might have spit in the eye of the U.S. in the last few years. It even sent a ship through the Panama Canal, the first time in decades. Why? No one in the world believes the Russian navy has a fighting chance in case of war, and coming under the silent guns of the American military couldn't be more pathetic.

5. ROD BLAGOFABITCH'S PUBLIC APPEARANCES - Does he look brave? Does he look innocent? Does he look gubernatorial?

Does he look pathetic? Oh yeah! That's the one, Pathetic!