“I love the people of this country, and you can’t be a politician and not shake hands,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall in early March, as the coronavirus was spreading both globally and in the U.S. But as the unorthodoxy of the Trump presidency has collided with the crisis of a global pandemic, handshakes have tended to suggest something else: defiance. Typically, those handshakes suggest retail politics in action-leaders’ desire to connect with their constituents. presidents are estimated to shake hands with some 65,000 people a year. (And then, according to his biographer, Edmund Morris, he “went upstairs and privately, disgustedly, scrubbed himself clean.”) Even in an age of mass media and digital outreach, U.S. Teddy Roosevelt once shook the hands of 8,513 people in a single day. William McKinley-who would be killed, eventually, by a gun that was hidden in the sleeve of an assassin who seemed to be offering a handshake-was famous for the “McKinley grip,” a grasp so efficient that it allowed him to meet the palms of as many as 50 people a minute. (“A History of President Trump’s Awkward Handshakes” was published in Time magazine just four months into his presidency.) In one way, Trump’s approach to flesh-pressing echoes traditions established by previous presidents. It was also one of many, many times that the current American president attempted to treat the handshake as a power play in miniature. This was the second time that Trump and Macron had locked their hands and their wits via a preposterously aggressive handshake. Read: Trump is building a dystopia in real time The Independent recruited several body-language experts to analyze the presidents’ performative glad-handing. Fox News reported that “Presidents Trump and Macron Shook Hands for a Really Long Time.” CNN’s Chris Cillizza offered a second-by-second analysis of the shake that refused to be shaken. During a pause in the music, the men grasped hands. In July 2017, the two world leaders, along with their wives, had been walking down the Champs-Élysées as part of a military parade celebrating both Bastille Day and the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I. That’s how long the handshake between President Donald Trump and President Emmanuel Macron lasted. But handshakes were never as egalitarian as people wanted them to be. The gestures, like the image of cheerful “space people” emerging from their saucers to say hi with humanoid hands, have been their own versions of wishful thinking. It is high time for them to go-and not only because their new risks far outweigh their old rewards. This moment, then, may well bring with it the end of handshakes. In April, Gregory Poland, an infectious-disease expert at the Mayo Clinic, captured the new wisdom like this: “When you extend your hand, you’re extending a bioweapon.” “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last month, explaining how efficiently handshakes can spread illness. And today, as a global pandemic brings a new round of anxious questions about what it means to be a denizen of Earth, the handshake has finally shed its old idealisms. In practice, however, the gestures have been much more fraught. Their mathematical simplicity-hand to hand, flesh to flesh-implies the dissolution of the differences that might otherwise separate one person from another. Handshakes, historically, have often been invoked in that way: as signals of easy equality, as hope for a friction-free world. Take comfort, Earthlings, the article suggested: Whatever mysteries might swirl in space’s inky unknown, there is no need to fear. One of them, smiling, extends its hand to a man who awaits them-a being so humanlike, in body and in culture, that it, too, uses handshakes as a gesture of greeting. The planetary neighbors would act like humans as well the Digest supplemented its story with a drawing of two visitors arriving, via flying saucer, on Earth. In February 1958, Science Digest, inspired by the launch of Sputnik and the consequent hastening of the space race, asked a question that was both timely and absurd: What will space people look like? Consulting unnamed scientists, the magazine concluded that extraterrestrials would likely “bear a strong resemblance to the man next door”: an upright posture, two eyes, two arms, two legs. Editor’s Note: This article is part of “ Uncharted,” a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.
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