The Juntoo

A pretty face, especially one in the first blush of its developing youth, is a charm to which we Americans are fatally susceptible. After years of observation, nearly two decades of analysis and careful notes, it’s a diagnosis of which I’m assured. It’s the Achilles’ heel by which a country of aesthetes, a country such as ours, is terribly hobbled, the soft underbelly of a once-rugged nation into which, with little effort, a small finger can puncture and tear a hole. In time, I’ve come to realize that it’s a unique susceptibility to which, despite our national pharmacopeia of endless drugs, we haven’t an effective antidote. We haven’t a sobering pill, a clarifying vaccine by which we might preemptively be saved, an antivenin by whose timely consumption we might be cleansed.

One can’t help but ask why we’ve abandoned all efforts directed toward such a remedy’s development? One can’t help but wonder how it is that we, an allegedly intellectual and sapient people of the highest class and the strongest spirit, are still enamored of an appealing ignis fatuus, a young and meretricious grin?

With a specious smile and a lambent flickering of the eye, that pretty face can, and likely will, be the future death of us all—for we’ve become a supine and unresisting nation. We’ve become a people into whose veins the dual poisons of effeminacy and a “victimhood” mentality have been so copiously bled. As such, not only our vital humors, but our constitutions have been changed. We are not what once we were.

That face, of whose mere glance these changes are a result, is an image to whose appeal we enjoy, despite the proud state of our full-stomachs and enviable good health, no real immunity. When we see that sublime mixture of efflorescence and confidence, that combination of vivacity, poise, and delectable, ripening youth, we’re very nearly overcome with an admiration of which we simply can’t shake ourselves. We’re entirely besotted. We feel in our bosom an odd sensation of enchantment and blind trust, a feeling of which only prettiness is productive, irrespective of the mind by which that comely face is made to move.  

At this point, early though it may be, we know not what occupies the mind of Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister (and perhaps successor) of the North Korean tyrant, Kim Jong-un. We haven’t a clue if she—like the brother, father, and grandfather out of whose virile lineage she’s so recently and anomalously emerged—is equally persuaded by the inherent brilliance of totalitarian rule. We don’t know what conversation chatters in the social, economic, political, and literary corners of her stilled lips and unforthcoming brain. We don’t know if she too, like the masculine forebears by whom she’s been preceded, took to heart the teachings of the master Orwell, of whose Oceania and Eastasia her own country is so frighteningly reminiscent. We don’t know if, given the chance, she’d accede the North Korean throne (a vacancy in which so plump a royal posterior was only just recently seated) and continue the oppression of an immiserated and wretched land.  

What we do know, however, and with an encouraging sense of reassurance and ease, is that she is a pretty woman. About this, there’s little doubt and, in this, we take much comfort. Odious she may yet prove to be, she’s pulchritudinous in the here and now, and that’s really all that matters. The imminent femme fatale is, at least at the present moment, nothing worse than an attractive diplomatist in whom we can invest our peace-loving dreams. She’s a soft and fresh representative of a hardened caste, a small, ossified elite through whose shell we’ve been unable to break. It’s shown no signs of fraying, no rupturing at its seams. Kim Yo-jong , pretty and pliable, might be amenable to giving way.

Her attraction is a fact of which, superficial though it may be, the western world became conscious but a few years ago. It was then, during the politically-tempestuous Winter Olympics of 2018, that she first appeared on television before the world. North Korea, the nation over which her brother presided and South Korea, that from which, at the fifty-third parallel, hers has been so long separated, joined in a sporting delegation of one. It was the first time in the nations’ schismatic history that such a partnership had been forged. It had, at the very least, an aroma of real progress and an affectation of goodwill. Latent empathy appeared to be bubbling to the surface. These might be feelings, the world hoped, of which the games would be not only temporarily productive, but assured for years to come.

From the start, the venture was inauspicious, considering the dearth of athletic talent of which the barren and malnourished northern half of that peninsula is possessed. Little was expected of their graceless mountain skiers and diminutive hockey players, but that wasn’t the point. The only success for which the North was hopeful was Kim Yo-jong’s entrée into the public eye. In that peculiar category, the one nation completely innocent of talent was awarded a gold.

Doubtless, she left an impression. To put it mildly, her appearance was one about which, for the duration of the games and for some time thereafter, the western media was positively enthused. She was profiled from every angle and in every appealing way. Every newspaper covered her emergence, every opinion website the immaculate quality of her feminine grace. Very few writers considered her a potentially dangerous leader, a probably complicit executioner, about whose great prettiness and diplomatic tact they might, if able, speak just a bit more reticently. Those thoughts could be stifled for a later time—a time at which, it seems, we’ve now arrived.

Misbegotten though it may be, it’s the belief of the international community that Kim Jong-un is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Chronologically young while physically aged, Kim Jong-un is said to have died of an unknown cause—a cause to which, inflamed with the heat of rampant speculation, the Wuhan Coronavirus is said to have been a contributor. The veracity of this report is yet unconfirmed, yet—be it not spurious but true—it would open to his little sister Kim Yo-jong a ready path to her early accession.

Perhaps, though, she actually wouldn’t be the recipient of the fawning honorific, Dear Leader. Medieval in most other ways, it could well be that North Korea’s government—democratic and republican only in name—is an adherent to the constraints of Salic Law, that originally French code by which any female successor might be excluded from the heights of high office. It might be a monarchy circumscribed by sex. Innocent of a better knowledge of that country’s political institutions (by whose inspection, I’m sure, we’d be thoroughly appalled), the external and curious world simply can’t know whether or not this is the case. This might be a government under which all people can equally suffer, but one over which only a select few men will rule.

But, assuming she does come to rule, America ought to be ready. Kim Yo-jong, though pretty, isn’t a leader of whom we needn’t be wary. Hers isn’t a face, like the potion-stirring Circe, of which we needn’t be cautious. Quite the contrary. We ought to study her with suspicion and care. We ought to leave at least one Odysseus on the ship. She is, after all, a Kim, and that name is a synonym for a killer. Let us, then, inoculate ourselves in anticipation of her regime. Let us be unsusceptible to a specious though dazzling grin.

The phrase, “modern-day lynching”, I’m convinced, is one of those idiomatic peculiarities, an utterance unique to the strangeness of American life, of which we make far too liberal a use. In so doing, we not only re-awaken the vestigial terrors by which our nation’s conscience, so much the better, I’m glad to say, as it pertains to issues of race, is still haunted, but we risk diluting the phrase of the potency in which it was once so frightfully drenched. We enfeeble it by overusing it, and we render it limp and dry.

Just short of one year and a half ago, in the setting of Chicago’s tempestuously frigid streets, the actor Jussie Smollett claimed that he’d been targeted, verbally castigated, and, most distressingly of all, physically assaulted by two men veiled by the concealing shroud of a deep Midwestern night. The men by whom, based on the lucid memory of his own account, Smollett was so brutally confronted were Caucasian—a fact by which, it soon became clear, most observers of his story were chillingly startled though not, lamentable though it may be, exceedingly surprised. It seemed, yet again, that the grander sympathies of mankind, toward which we felt ourselves to have made such noble progress, were subordinated to the inextricable animosities of race.

These two barbaric and faceless men, atop whose heads rested not woven knit caps, as might be expected as the protective, sartorial measures of which that city’s unfathomable winds are demanding, but a couple of “Make America Great Again” hats of which those inconvenienced by the cold make such heated and fervid use, proceeded to humiliate the vulnerable and—judging by the peculiarity of his culinary choice at so early an hour—desperately hungry Smollett (he was carrying in his arm at the time of his assault at 2:00 AM a sandwich from a local Subway—of which, it might be added, his assailants were pitifully incapable of dispossessing him). These two dastardly men, of whose odious identities Smollett was so unwaveringly certain, proceeded to pour upon the black actor’s face a cup of bleach, before tossing around his neck a rope tied into the shape of a noose. The very fact of his survival was, if any there need be, proof of the presence of a divine and intervening hand. The fact that Smollett was alive, much less capable of retelling his tale, was a miracle about which later Hollywood scriptures would surely be written.  

For many weeks thereafter, indeed, until the advent of a slightly more credible narrative in which, with greater confidence, the lot of us might place our stunned belief, Smollett’s attack was said to have been an example of a “modern-day lynching”. This phrase, which causes, merely with the repetition of my reading it, every one of the hairs on my spine to stand on their end, was tossed about indefatigably. Every news station repeated it, as if it were prescribed mantra. No clearer example might be conceived. It was the explanation, indeed the only explanation, to which most in the commentariat subscribed. More than that, it was a conclusion, at the time, apparently soberly made, to which none would dare offer an alternative, much less a rebuttal. The facts, such as they were presented, seemed inarguably clear.

Of course, as we soon were to discover, this was no “modern-day lynching”, but a fabulously constructed ruse. It might’ve been self-asphyxiation or the act of intra-personal violence, but to Smollett’s life, there was no external threat. It was the self-indulgent outcry of an actor to whom, in the weakness and insecurity of his own opinion, insufficient attention had been paid. It was the elaborate deceit of a pathologic liar, an egotistical charlatan for whom, if only to advance the middling prestige of his sputtering television career, no trickery was too extraordinary. Nevertheless, the phrase, “modern-day lynching”—with its farcical application in this particular case—was too quickly and liberally used (as it’s been many times before and since).

What, then, are we to think when the phrase actually does apply? How are we to respond, a population increasingly desensitized to the term, when a “modern-day lynching” actually does transpire, as it very likely seems to have in the state of Georgia but a few months ago?

There, in the town of Brunswick, a coastal city not far from that of Jacksonville, a man by the name of Ahmaud Arbery chose as his method of exercise a run on a temperate Sunday afternoon. The neighborhood through which he jogged, in whose street he was eventually killed, was one, despite the later testimony of his murderers, unacquainted with criminal activity of any serious kind. Arbery seems not to have altered this peaceful and hospitable trend. The only action, it seems, by which the community’s suspicions were aroused on this fatal day was his harmless inspection of a waterfront house. Being that it was in the early stages of its building and development, the house stood as a fledgling structure of which all who gazed upon it took notice, a new addition to the area’s tranquil landscape about which any innocent passerby might be equally curious.

Arbery, whose irrepressible curiosity, if not the immutable pigmentation of his skin, provoked to an armed confrontation the rage of two local white men—a father and son by the name of McMichael. After tarrying a while beneath the vacant archways of the unfinished house, Arbery continued along the predetermined path of his jog. He did so until reaching the fatal impediment by which his run, soon to be his life, was obstructed. Ahead of him in the middle of the road, clearly situated to detain him from the completion of his jog, awaited the McMichael boys. Every indication points to the idea that the McMicahels were not especially in the mood to talk. They appeared to be of the “shoot first, question later” ilk. Theirs was a presence, at once corpulent and pugnacious, away from which, despite Arbery’s nimblest efforts, he simply couldn’t run.

As if a caricature drawn from a Jim-Crow-Georgia scene, the likes by which a northerner’s unfriendly conception of the backward south is so often and unjustly colored, the white McMichaels were perched atop a pickup truck waiting for the arrival of the black Arbery. Guns in hand, they lingered about their vehicle behind which, in a truck similar to their own, a friend followed with a recording device—on which this impending crime, to the great shock and horror of the nation, was to be captured and replayed. The elder McMichael, lately retired of the county’s police force, stood in the bed of the truck with a pistol in hand. He seemed to be of the dangerous opinion that the role of police officer, even in his retirement, ought to carry with it the honorific of emeritus, by which he might further justify and prolong his extra-legal, vigilante career.His son, aged thirty years, and with no such prior law enforcement credential, stood on the street with a shotgun. The two were armed not for conversation, but for the premature taking of a life.

Endeavoring to circumvent what looked to be an unwholesome, though perhaps unavoidable interaction, Arbery attempted to dodge the passenger side of the truck. As he did so, a shot rang out, after which, in the escalating heat of the confrontation, the younger McMichael and the wounded Arbery were desperately engaged. It was, expectedly, a one-sided affair. Shorn, at the most inconvenient time, of the fantasy of superhuman strength about which, in comics, we read, and the immortality by which our Marvel heroes are reliably preserved, Arbery was unable to disarm the younger McMichael of his gun. Two shots later, Arbery was dead. Prone on the pavement, white shirt beginning to seep with red, Arbery gasped through the pores of the cement atop which he laid the stifled oxygen of his final, metallic breath. The smoke of the shotgun dissipated in the air, as a cloud gathered, once again, over the conscience of an injured country’s damaged soul.

This situation, about which, with all of its previously withheld and gruesome details, the country is just now learning, is an example, indeed, hopefully the last example, of a “modern-day lynching”. I hope, forevermore, the term is used only by those who fabricate its act. I’ll suffer a Smollett, if it would save me, for his family an Arbery. Let the term be abused, if only its actual victims might be saved.

One’s past vices, though past, are seldom inescapable. We learn, rather, that they’re devilishly devoted beasts, monsters purely of our own making from which we can’t easily run away. They are, in more ways than one, persistent entanglements of which we can’t be unburdened, strongly-tied cords of whose knots we’re never completely free. Once cultivated in youth and given their range, they’ll not easily forsake us in age.

This includes illimitable age, geriatric age, a dotard’s age, the age at which the quiet octogenarian—in the placidity of his deserved repose—begins languidly to reflect on a life well or improperly lived. This includes the age of Joe Biden—the presumptive presidential nominee behind whom, without the convenient excuse of a paucity of any number of worthy alternatives (among whom, but a few months ago, there were but so many to choose), the Democrat Party seems bewilderingly to have coalesced. The reason for its having done so, with the passage of each monotonous, COVID-ridden week, seems increasingly to beggar explanation. The feebleness of his mind, the sunken infirmity of his mien, the ineloquence of his speech, and the inconsistency of his vacillating political ideas make ever more evident to a disinterested voter that this is not a man in whose future prospects—not only as a viable presidential candidate, but as an independently-functioning and thinking human being—much confidence can be placed.

This is the natural degradation, the unavoidable senescence by which age—despite the efforts of its fiercest combatants in those industries of everlasting wellness and health—is so unwelcomingly attended. As such, it’s not a state of being, a clearly waning state of being, of which Joe Biden should be at all embarrassed. Decrepitude is the state to which, with any luck, we’ll all naturally succumb. A violent, and maybe premature death awaits the rest. It’s the natural consequence of a life long-lived, and none, save an Adonis, an Achilles, or a Dorian Gray, wears upon his face the glow of youth forever. It’s a mask, by whose ephemerality we’re all admittedly frustrated, of which we’ll all soon be deprived.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we should extend to Biden the leniency by which he might dispossess himself of every residuum of shame. Shame is responsible for the marks one wears, the boils and scars that can’t be effaced. His previous vices, now coming to the fore through the distressing story of which Ms. Tara Reade is the newest author, make for a most shameful and unprepossessing sight. It’s a sight, in the full depiction of its contents, at which even the toughest among us will cringe. This is a vice, peculiar to Joe Biden, for which age, despite the largeness of its number, offers but little explanation. Being “old” is no exculpatory defense. This form of sexual predation (and, its concomitant vice, open and unrepentant deceit) has long followed the former Senator throughout the turns and twists of his adult life.

The ugly curiosa of Biden’s sexual past, the arresting details of his inveterate tendency to prey upon the vulnerable women to whom, because of his position, he was always a superior, is not the topic into which, despite its inherent attraction and current popularity, I’d care to delve at this time. I’d rather not linger, if it can be helped, on the lasciviousness of which our male political class appear to be fully enslaved. It is too lamentable and, as I’ve come to think, too incorrigible a state about which to bother one’s weary head.

Rather, I’m more interested in the position in which the Democrat Party, the self-professed defender of women’s rights and warrior for the “Me Too” cause, has found itself so unenviably placed.

This is a party to whom, as we’ve been led to believe, any whiff of sexual impropriety, regardless of its source, is considered absolutely intolerable. This is the party, the paragon of women’s rights, at whose instigation every indecent sexual affront must and will be pursued in a court of law. Failing that, it’ll be brought before the unforgiving eye of the public’s opinion—an often severer and more scrutinizing jury whose preference is the wielding of the sword before the scale. It’s a body, indeed our body, from which accused men or women very rarely escape fully upright and intact.

The Democrat Party has often gone about this task, of which, proudly, it’s made itself so dauntless a champion, with a sort of aloofness to the importance of corroborative truth. Too often, evidence is an impediment by which it’d rather not be bothered, an afterthought of which it reminds itself much later than it should. This approach, mostly wayward, is all wind and all sail, with very little ballast and anchor. It’s moved by the breath of an allegation, the sneeze of sedition. It’s become a group of holy crusaders, a band unburdened of rationality as it looks to pillory every evil-acting man. It’s undismayed and uninterrupted by the speed bumps of sober and secular truths, those well-worn paths on which our legal system treads with careful gait.

It’s become insensitive to the weight of evidence, that essential part of any case without which the justice on which it’s dependent dies a thousand times. It’s unfeeling to the bumpy contours of caution and the law, to the protean curves of verification and the truth, those meddlesome corners on which legitimate justice hinges. It’s much more animated by the dictates of hasty, blind, untested, and unsubstantiated “belief”. It believes all women, condemns all men, and very seldom apologizes if the latter happens, though he be guiltless, to be charged with a possible crime. It’s quite that binary and simple. Such is the conceit of feminine infallibility, the ground in which the “Me Too” maxim roots itself and out of which, with a lengthening shadow, it emerges, sprouts, and grows.

Joe Biden is the rotten fruit of that tree. During the cause célèbre that was the confirmation process of Brett Kavanaugh, upon whom, weeks earlier, the lofty imprimatur of the President was so enthusiastically placed, Biden was unequivocal in his support of all women, in his unconditional belief of all women. He was a vocal champion of Dr. Christine Blassey-Ford, the intrepid woman by whom, albeit without much evidence, Brett Kavanaugh was so notoriously accused. Claiming that the “essence” of a woman’s allegation was to be held as something tantamount to a veritable truth, a reality against which no question might be posed, Biden pushed for an unattainable standard by which he desired others, though perhaps not himself, to live. Yet live by it he must. And, possibly, as we shall see in the coming weeks, die by it as well.

He could, conceivably, arrive at his political death, if not his corporeal end, in one of two ways. He might martyr himself to the cause of “Me Too”, an approach of which the former Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, made such unpunctual use (had he been able to anticipate the sins of which his colleagues would later be accused, he might’ve stayed in his job and weathered the storm; apologies, as you well know, have become shockingly passé and the Democrats, so long as it’s a Democrat, are more than willing to overlook an unsightly affair). Biden could, under the pressure of the public’s response, voluntarily retreat from political life. He’d be seen as a man who scourged himself and leapt into the flames of the hot wrath of “Me Too”. He’d be seen as that unusual person (that figure of which history provides but few examples) for whom, in the difficulty of the moment, a standard isn’t a vacant platitude merely, but an honest way of life. He’d show himself to be a man who’d value, even more than the power and the prestige of the office to which he aspired, the remnants of his tattered honor. He’d be seen as someone held to a higher ideal, an ideal in whose presence a shortcoming, indeed his own shortcoming, wouldn’t be tolerable. His reputation might then be saved, and he’d be lauded as something better than himself, someone better than he deserves.

Alternatively, he could serve in the role of a sacrificial goat, an old beast out of whose political bowels every ounce of nutriment has already been milked. Desiccated and unproductive, lecherous and lewd, Joe Biden hasn’t any longer much to offer the Democrat Party, much less the nation as a whole. He hasn’t much more to give to a party, a sexually-deviant clique, of which he was so long a vital and contributing member.

The Democrat Party, wanting to re-establish what’s left of its deflated moral worth, might forcibly push poor Biden off to the side in pursuit of that goal. This might be the only means by which the party’s fallen scrupulosity can be saved, if it can be saved at all (a proposition of which, given the conduct and short-memory of our age, I’m highly doubtful). The party, for once, would be seen to be taking seriously the maxims of which it’s so breathless a promulgator, and so constant a transgressor (it’s unclear at this time which of the two it does more). It would be seen to be living by the standard that it helped to create. It would be a reclamation of the moral high ground on which, in the absence of all others, it enjoyed an inviolable plot of land and a towering view, an ethereal heaven to which neither centrist nor conservative was ever granted access.

To achieve this, though, it would decisively have to force Biden out; that lofty place is inhospitable to predatory men such as he.  

Should either of these two things occur, that of Biden’s voluntary martyrdom or his unwilling removal, the Democrat Party would be free to replace what is, by any measure, an ailing and stumbling candidate with a more healthful and desirable choice. The options among whom, so late in the game, it might choose would be few, but they’d be relatively stronger, and probably more defensible, than the man who’s limping toward the election come this fall. It would have the liberty, compelled by a late summer’s exigency at the DNC Convention in July, to introduce in his stead a person around whom the party, and probably not a few apostate Trump-supporters, might rally with unusual glee.

Or, more than likely, the party will sally forth with what it has—the detestably unrepentant Joe Biden. It’ll close its eyes, cover its ears, and jump again, head first, into the waves of hypocrisy and deceit. Damn the torpedoes, damn the double-standards, and, most importantly, damn the rape allegations by which any lighter vessel would be fatally sunk (Kavanaugh, it appears, was such a vessel). It’ll silence Ms. Reade and point its finger in the direction opposite its own. It’ll accuse the incumbent of crimes of which its own candidate is so credibly guilty.

Such is the nature of the vices of your past; they’ll never let you go, they’ll always drag you down. That which attaches itself to you in youth, will never forsake you in age. Neither, it seems, will the Democrat Party forsake old Joe.

I’ve long considered the handshake—that tactile exchange of cordiality, understanding, salutation, and good-will, that fleshy trade of influence, business, subtlety, and tact—to be not only a barbarous, but an unhygienic display. It’s uncivilized and it’s unclean. It’s atavistic and it’s dirty, antiquated and foul. On the whole, if I might be so blunt, it’s ugly and it’s old, much more the former than the latter, but still as undeserving as ever of its continued employment—especially during this, a pandemic-stricken age.

Granted, this is an opinion by which, especially when considering the natural ease of my sociability and the warmth of my embrace, you might be taken aback. A young, gregarious fellow such as me, you might think, shouldn’t be cringing at the thought of pressing another man or woman’s hand, around which my own, in return, is so lovably to be encompassed. I seem, at least from a distance, to be the kind of chap to whom this level of misanthropy and unease would be inimical. I assure you, it’s not. You might even think me a hypocrite of the worst kind, being that I participate in this allegedly “repugnant” act of the grasping of hands many hundreds of times every single day. That I may be. I’ll not refute the charge.

Nevertheless, the fact remains: the handshake as we know it is a barbarous and unhygienic display. Disagree if you will, convince me if you might, this is an opinion of which I’ve long been persuaded and now, more than ever, it’s become one upon which I feel the urgent need to expatiate. 

The handshake is, regardless of your prior attachment to it, an admittedly strange and perverse act. It isn’t at all to be recommended in the delicate age of our society, a courtesy to be mimicked and transferred from one epoch to the next. It’s an act to which modern man, despite his modernity, has become oddly habituated, and one of whose supposed value and utility he ought to be disabused. A thorough consideration of its worth is a scrutiny to which it’s been, despite our culture’s emphasis on cleanliness, wholly unsusceptible, and I can’t figure out the reason why. We must examine the handshake for what it is and, as the lone advocate of its alternative, I’m happy to begin that discussion. Sadly, it seems a discussion to which, as this alien disease has made apparent to us, we’re all arriving just a bit too late.

For one, as I said, the handshake is barbarous. It hasn’t the mark of urbanity and refinement, the echoes of respectability and high class of which we, as modern, Westernized humans, feel ourselves uniquely possessed. It is of elder origins, and not all that is old is good. Certainly, very few of those things are worth the labors of which their preservation is so relentlessly demanding. Those signs of advancement and progress, those signs with which we flatter and associate our modern selves, are unknown to the old, to the low, to the sordid act that is the handshake.

Here we are, touching and squeezing the damp underbelly of our fellow’s moisture-bathed palm. We feel, as its grasp returns our own, the fleshy corrugations and the various turns in which its cold surface is enfolded. We clasp, one concavity to the next, a perspiring pit of slime and filth, a depth of the epidermis out of which, with any luck, we’d do well with alacrity to climb. We feel, all too intimately, the return of his feebleness or his strength, the perception of his diffidence or stolidity, of his hesitation or resolve, of a tremulous despair or an insuperable pinch of which we’ll be acutely, often painfully conscious. From a limp-wrist to a Titan’s touch, there is no nuance, no modulation. We’d do better to read such messages in the eyes, subtler organs of which these truths are far more illuminative.

The hands, on the other hand, are quite vulgar and rather dim. Such is the result of being engaged more often in action, than in reflection, in deed than in thought. The hands manipulate, seldom cogitate, and we must judge them on the basis of their supreme unwisdom. They’re the appendages at whose tips the mind’s whims are carried out, but they have no thoughts of their own. Surely we can extend to our fellow man a part of the body more brilliant than this.

As much as the handshake is barbarous, it’s also unclean. I could hardly emerge from the foregoing paragraph without making mention of this obvious and, as it turns out, ominous fact. This goes almost without my having said so, but it does bear repeating. I needn’t go so far as to frighten you by quantifying the number of transmissible germs, to which the filthy handshake is so eagerly conducive. The figure, exceeding three thousand various bacteria of which a century and a half of species is productive, is no sooner comprehended as it is, for lack of a better word, felt.

The secularist and the religious zealot, on this point, will surely agree. The handshake hasn’t the cleanliness of the divinity by which we were made, the immaculate, spotless idea out of whose lofty image our own was once forged. Can we not honor him and ourselves in any better way than to squeeze and sully each other’s clammy, restive, and germ-laden hands? Can we not choose for our salutation a perhaps more sterile approach, one that sanctifies not only us, but the maker out of whose head, much like the dauntless, Parthenos Athena, unravished and completely clean, we once so brilliantly sprung? For him, for us, for her, we must do better.

The handshake as we know it is a pestiferous conduit of every communicable disease. It’s a route along which a bevy of infinitesimal and animated plagues eagerly join to dance and glide. To them, there could be nothing so easy, no home more inviting to their unruly presence, than the outstretched and feeling hand. It’s an avenue from which, from the base of the palm, to the tip of the finger, to the unkempt beds of nails around which all types of naughty excrescences grow, neither bacterial nor viral passenger is barred. All are welcome on this uncleanly path. All are encouraged with bon voyage! To amble about in the pursuit of their devilish ends.

As such, I’d like very much to see the handshake abolished and, if at all possible, replaced. It must be and, with the few encouragements by which this current pandemic has been attended, I think it soon shall be. The reasons are but too clear. It is, as I said, an insalubrious and a barbarous display, and we, last I checked, are a polished and a civilized people. It is what we are not. This disharmony simply can’t be sustained, and the handshake must go.  

More than a display merely, a show of which, surely countless times each day, we all mindlessly partake, the handshake is, so far as I can tell, an artifact of our ancient affability—an affability for whose forwardness and zest we’re currently being punished. This sentiment is, at its best, a fossil of our friendliness, a gold piece lodged in the iron-rusted shaft of our communal mine, a deeply-set but distinctively-hewn stone, by whose extraction we’ve come to profit. It’s a gem, indeed, a glimmering ruby in the warm stratum of a life to which solitude, always tarnishing yet now said to be absolutely vital in the face of a pandemic, is entirely averse. It is at the very center of our sympathy, while encompassing the girth of our regard for all humankind. It strikes at the core of our immemorial bonhomie, the fellow-feeling by which our society was once and is ever again raised and refreshed.

The noble but fading handshake, that object of my simultaneous bewilderment and scorn, is an old vestige of our too-palpable past. And I do mean, literally, too palpable in its feeling ways. It’s a crude means not only of communication, but of transaction beyond which, for the better health and future promise of our ailing species, we’d do well immediately to evolve.

Like the idle appendix from which, despite its quite remarkable persistence at the periphery of the gut, our intestinal exertions derive but little profit, or the coccyx of the lower spine into which, with a curious tapering and concave twist, our previously arboreal tails are now condensed and fused, the handshake is an old part of us with which we can now safely dispense. We need it not, but that doesn’t mean it should be swept away from the nostalgic peculiarities of our memory. We can study it still in our museums and in our houses of anthropology. We can still refer to it in the footnotes of our thick and dusty books. We can view it as a curiosity to which our forebears were strangely habituated, one to which they failed to find an acceptable replacement in the months and years of their own good time. We can gaze upon reenactments of it as though it were a distant and an antiquated act—not unlike the leaping of the bulls on the island of Crete, or the rain dance of the Aztec and the Maya.

That said, there must be a gesture by which, in its newfound absence, the handshake of old, that to which we’ve been so obdurately committed, is to be replaced. My suggestion is but a subtle variation, one with whose adoption we’ll encounter not even the slightest difficulty. It’s a change of which, without even a bit of practice, we’ll all be happily capable. It’s but a slight adjustment to the posture in which we’ve held ourselves for far too long a time.

My proposal is none other than the “forearm” handshake—that grasping and shaking not of the hands, but of the wrists. More accurately, I suppose, it really shouldn’t be called a “handshake” at all, at least not insofar as that abused exchange beyond which, as I’ve convinced you, we really ought to move, is to be understood. The “arm-shake”, if you will, is a far nobler and more sophisticated display of which, in very short order, I think we’ll all become quite fond. You’ll soon witness a society to whom it’s become, like the breathing of one’s air behind the fabric of a mask, agreeably natural. You need only try it, feel it, receive it, and you’ll surely agree.

One grasps not the hand, but the wrist—the lower, tapering part of the forearm from which, in their aspirational reach toward the external and sensible world, our vital and dexterous tendons and veins join to emerge. The flesh of the lower forearm, a region unencumbered by the stigmata of our fallen prophets, the sweat of our nervous associates, or the adhesion of the germs to which both were invariably susceptible, is the area toward which all our future greetings will be directed. It’s a tract of prime anatomical real state—a region under-utilized up until this point in time. It’s an area pliant yet resilient, tapered yet tough, accommodating of the effeminacy or the masculinity of every incoming grip with which it might come into contact.

The lower forearm leading into the wrist is, in every way, a beautiful juncture of which we make insufficient use—made all the more beautiful and useful in that it plays so negligible a role in the transmission of disease. Consider, if you will, the filth by which your hands—despite your relentless lathering and scrubbing—are coated. As stated, it’s an inconceivable amount—greater in number than the years since the fall of Troy. The quantity beggars description. So too does it tempt infection, yet I, for one, would prefer a mind beclouded to a body ravaged. Truly, it might be said that this quantity is no real fault of the hand; it’s but the innocent appendage upon which the body’s messiest of missions are placed. Still, it carries these germs nevertheless, a fact for which it must be blamed.

This, on its own, isn’t so much a trouble. The problem is the surface (though more often, the orifice) on which the itinerant and inconstant hand subsequently lands. As if magnetically attracted to the sovereign source by which it’s controlled, the hand inevitably reaches for the head and the face. Seldom obstructed, it finds its way to the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth—whose openings are as doorways of safe and well-trodden caves. This, in a word, is how disease is transmitted. A handshake is received, the contents of which are then, for lack of a better word, consumed. If not consumed, then absorbed, though almost always unwittingly so by the holes by which the face is dotted.

The arm-shake offers no such risk. The infrequency with which the forearm makes contact with the face is hardly worthy of remark. Aside from its use in the removal of sweat from an over-heated brow, or the placement of it on a head in preparation of a swoon, can you think of the forearm daring to penetrate the holes of your face? It not only wouldn’t, it positively couldn’t. It knows much better than to sully that sovereign land. So while it might receive the germs by which your fellow’s hand was occupied, it hasn’t the ability to transport them. And if the fear is not their eventual movement to your face, but their temporary residence atop your wrist’s skin, consider the fact that most of us are in the habit of wearing long-sleeves throughout most days of the year. Your jacket’s fabric, between whose stitches a bacterium finds nothing genial to life, simply won’t be a vector about which to be concerned.

The forearm shake, you see, is in every way to be preferred. Let us, as we overcome this disease, readily adopt its use. Let us embrace it with the enthusiasm of which, for the past month, we’ve been so unnaturally starved. Let it re-awaken the warmth by which our sociability was once colored, let it grip us and guide us into the delicacies of the post-pandemic age. Hand in wrist, wrist in hand, there’s nowhere we can’t go.

I awoke one morning, no longer ago than a week today, to read among the headlines that the act of protesting—that once unique and aboriginal American right—had been deemed by the Raleigh Police Department in North Carolina a “non-essential activity”.

It was, in the terse announcement of the department’s tweeted decree, an activity from which we might all do well to desist. Indeed, more than that, the department made clear, with an economy of words and a lack of rationale by which, even in the clarity of my more wakeful state, I’m still thoroughly shocked, that protesting is an activity from which its state’s citizens will be barred. They simply won’t be allowed to do it, so far as the department is concerned—and the department’s concern is rather final and complete. And, given the source of the pronouncement and the power with which its officers are endowed, one might imagine its enforcement coming not from the abridged suggestions of the Twitter-machine (of which they’ve proven themselves of making fine and expedient use), but from the muzzle of a state-issued gun—an instrument to whose persuasiveness very few people, despite their outward pretentions of patriotism and strength, are unsusceptible.

Bleary of eye and languid of spirit, I thought myself—with the passing of a hope by which all of my fleetingly happy mornings are daily attended—dizzily in error, if not still entrenched in the mental morass of what had become of a bad and terrible dream. I rubbed my eyes, stiffened my soul, and looked down yet again at the headline with which I was previously and rudely confronted. My first impression, however sluggish it might’ve been, wasn’t in fact amiss. For this, I was sorry. I wasn’t wrong in believing that which I saw, and was now sufficiently sober to realize this was no mere bad dream. The words on the page were true. Protesting in North Carolina, if not in America, had become a “non-essential” activity as I slept, blithely and uninterruptedly, overnight in the safe and distant comfort of my warm and silent bed.  

Like so many of the other “insufficiently important” activities to which, to our great and accruing frustration, that pervasive and ill-defined “non-essential” tag has been affixed, that of protesting, that of demonstrating before our elected officials the grievances by which we’ve been burdened and seeking from them their prompt redress, has been deemed one—not unlike haircuts, barbeques, and gatherings on the beach—of which we can be stripped. State and local governments can simply take that right, and possibly many others, away from your weakening grasp. Surely, you might respond, the right to protest, the right of the people “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government” for a correction of the affronts of which it’s invariably justly accused, is only slightly more sacrosanct than those three things of which I made earlier note. Can we not, then, for the sake of a pandemic, simply treat them as being, for all intents and purposes, one in the same?

Apparently, when it comes to matters of essentiality, protesting, along with all those others activities, are indeed very much of the same ilk. They might just as well be grouped together as a collective and growing whole, a mass of nonsense between which there’s little variation to be seen. It appears to be the case, in a reversal of Orwell’s animal axiom, that some activities are less non-essential than others, and protesting, viewed on this list, doesn’t rise especially high. As such, protesting becomes but another cheap and trivial privilege, a thing quite inferior to the enumerated and Constitutional right it once irreducibly claimed itself to be. It becomes a plaything of local officials intoxicated by their own gaseous fumes of power, a past-time from whose pursuit their own citizens can be blocked. All this, by way of an alien virus and a petty tyrant’s anxious tweet.

I think, sadly, in deeming an action essential or not, those by whom the decision is made incompletely grasp the weight of the meaning of term. They fail to acknowledge, much less accurately to measure, the gravity of the word they so liberally bandy about. What, after all, does it truly mean to be essential? It’s not a question of passing moment, one impatiently to be cast off when otherwise bothered by the events of the day. It isn’t to be lost in the midst of the many exigencies from which, one week and now one month to the next, there seem to be no respite. It must be faced, and seriously so.

I urgently wonder if anyone has deeply, or even passively taken the time to busy him or herself with the thought. By whom, along the journey our subjective preferences, is something finally given that lofty, inviolable imprimatur of “essential”? How does one action or entity, as opposed to its competitor, arrive at that estimable point upon which all hope to converge? What can that one which failed not also do to arrive there? And, once there, for what duration of time can it retain this approbation and this title? How long does it sit atop that sky-tickling perch of the essential, and when, if ever, will it be told to come down? Once rescinded, can it ever be given its title again? Once fallen, can it ever again climb so high a height?

In the pursuit of these answers, for which, so far as it appears to me, our intrepid leaders haven’t the smallest interest, one needn’t delve into the ancient subtleties of Greek philosophy and Scholastic Christian thought, nor into the life-affirming peculiarities of the existentialist’s creed. Certainly, we could. One might flip through the edifying but obscure pages of the Metaphysics of Aristotle for an answer. There, in that great but recondite work, the distinction between substance and essence will at some length be found. The former is that of which both form and matter partake—a hylomorphic combination with which the Stagirite’s master, Plato, would rather animatedly disagree. Essence, on the other hand, is that which exists in virtue of itself—in the tranquil absence of any foreign influence by which it might be corrupted and changed. It is fundamental, self-sustaining, and, on its own merit, unfailingly complete. It can’t be convinced to be otherwise.

Taken as such, based on the original denotation of the word essence and, from it, essential, the right to protest in America must be considered just that. It can be nothing less, it can exceed to be nothing more. It is at its uppermost height, and our Constitutional foundation. It is, in every meaningful way, as essential as an essence can be.

Protesting is not only an essential activity, contrary to that opinion about which, as we’ve seen, the Raleigh Police Department is so dimly imperious, but, rather, the essential activity from which we derive our very life. It is the rudimentary and native imprint upon our bones by which our American body is defined. It is that indivisible, inextricable part of us upon which, in foul weather or fair, we can always reliably lean. It is, in conclusion, something in whose absence we can’t hope to live, a vital piece of ourselves apart from which we can’t imagine ourselves. To call it otherwise is to misconstrue not only the term in itself, but the soul of the people, the spirit of America, by whom it’s given life.

A foreign pandemic, introduced from the Orient, has caused us to forget our essence. An anxious tyranny, grown on our shores, has ensured that it won’t soon be recalled. A supine people, living inside us, seems unequal to gathering its once mighty effort. In what ways do we ravage ourselves?