A handshake is brief and so is this essay, but both the social ritual and the essay are important for understanding the social distance policy that dictates no hand-to-hand contact.This essay provides a good deal of helpful information about shaking hands for any reason. It was the ultimate ironic moment when the *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King announced the social distance prototcol against hand shaking and then turned and shook hands with those in attendance for the proclaation. If this is an episode in the (fair & balanced) critique of maladministration, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
This genius parody has become this blogger's current earworm and Resistance Anthem. So, if this is a (fair & balanced) first step toward doing the right thing, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
In Memoriam: The Handshake
By Micah Hauser
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
The handshake, a widespread social custom that has forged political alliances, sealed multibillion-dollar business deals, and taught fathers “a thing or two” about prospective sons-in-law, died alone last month, in quarantine. It was at least two thousand eight hundred years old. (An early appearance: a limestone dais, carved in the mid-ninth century BCE, depicting the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III hand in hand with a Babylonian ally.)
The cause of death? Sudden awareness by the general population that every surface on earth—and, especially, the appendages we use to touch said surfaces—are misted with an invisible, potentially lethal cocktail of viral droplets. The shake had been on life support since early March. After declaring a national emergency at a Rose Garden press conference, President Trump shook hands with assorted executives. Then Bruce Greenstein, the chief strategy-and-innovation officer of LHC Group, extended an elbow. The dominoes were falling. Mercado Libre, a Latin-American e-commerce platform, moved to replace the handshake in its logo with an elbow bump. The director general of the World Health Organization tweeted that he would now be greeting people with a “hand-on-heart” gesture. Others found the habit hard to shake. On March 9th, the Dutch Prime Minister announced a national no-shake policy, then turned and shook hands with a health official. “Oh, sorry!” he said. “We can’t do that anymore. Sorry, sorry.”
Dorothea Johnson, the founder of the Protocol School of Washington and a co-author of The Power of Handshaking: For Peak Performance Worldwide (2004), couldn’t bear the news. Reached by telephone, in Maine, she said, “It’s how we connect to someone when we first meet them. Touching someone, it helps you create a friendship, a relationship. It’s so important.”
In Primary Colors (1996, 2006), the author, Joe Klein, calls the handshake “the threshold act, the beginning of politics.” Rabin and Arafat, Reagan and Gorbachev, Nixon and the King of Rock and Roll, all went palm-to-palm. The US President, according to one estimate, shakes hands with sixty-five thousand people per year. In 1907, President Teddy Roosevelt, known for his “pump handling,” shook more than eight thousand hands in a single afternoon. Afterward, his biographer wrote, he went upstairs to “scrub himself clean.”
A solid shake relies on a combination of grip and intuition. Pamela Holland, a co-author of Help! Was That a Career Limiting Move? (2009), has advised, “Go in, thumb up, at a right angle. Make sure you make the full contact, web to web. Two to three pumps, then drop. It’s a little like a kiss: You’ll know when it’s over.” A lot can go wrong. There are arm-twisters, bone-crushers, yankers, dead fish. “Some people are totally unsophisticated,” Johnson said. Like who? She demurred. She once shook hands with Trump, a known handshake hater, but decorum held. “Not soft, not hard,” she recalled. “It was brief. He is very adept at moving on.”
It is often said that handshakes evolved as a way to show that you weren’t holding a weapon. (The up-and-down motion would dislodge a dagger that had been hidden up a sleeve.) The Greeks put an image of the shake on gravestones, using it to link the living and the dead. Romans, who put it on coins, used it to link the living and the stuff they wanted to buy. The Quakers popularized it; they considered it to be more egalitarian than bowing. And yet the history of handshaking is riddled with conscientious objectors, ahead of their time. In 2015, a UCLA hospital established a “handshake-free zone” in its neonatal intensive-care unit. (Research suggests that substituting fist bumps cuts germ transmission by ninety per cent.) But the UCLA policy lasted just six months. In France, an Algerian woman was recently denied citizenship for refusing to shake an official’s hand at her naturalization ceremony. She appealed on religious grounds; her petition was denied.
Sanda and Florin Dolcos, psychology researchers at the University of Illinois, have conducted a series of studies on the ritual’s longevity. Their conclusion: it’s a little like sex. “Handshake activity activates a part of the brain that also processes other types of reward stimulus: good food, or drinks, or something related to, um, closer physical interactions,” Florin said.
The handshake is survived by the elbow bump, the foot shake, the peace sign, and the wave. “These customs do evolve,” Sanda Dolcos said. “The replacements might seem awkward at first, because the handshake is so natural, so automatic, so ingrained. But people will find a new way.” In lieu of flowers, send Purell. ###
[Micah Hauser is a Fact-Checker and writer at The New Yorker who joined the magazine.in 2018. He received a BA (English) from Tufts University (MA) and an MS with honors (Journalism) from the Graduate School Of Journalism of Columbia University (NYC).]
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