I don’t know which cable news yakker started making a fuss over
what he (or she) called a “terrorist fist bump” exchanged by Barack
Obama and his wife Michelle, but he (or she) unknowingly started a
fuss that reveals the state of the elite mind and of the elites’
take on American culture. It also reveals that cohort’s isolation
from everyday life.
First, let’s define “elite.” I refer, with that term, to a
self-designated member of a smallish group in media, academe, and
sometimes entertainment (for reasons to be seen later, the fist
bump probably excludes entertainment figures from the current
flap), who talk on TV, who see themselves as “opinion makers”
(working under the rubric “journalism”), and who are hypersensitive
to cultural indicators that can be chewed over as hot topics or
talking points. Like the producers of Muzak, they have an endless
hunger for material. Give them one good piece of verbiage, and the
whole tiny tribe of them will repeat it over and over again.
Think of Rush Limbaugh’s funny audio montages of media figures
saying exactly the same thing. “Gravitas” is the most famous,
employed to describe Dick Cheney when George W. Bush first picked
him as his vice presidential candidate.
What makes the elites so funny?They’re so busy talking that they
don’t listen.
Now the fist bump shows up on a New Yorker cover,
depicting Barack Obama in Middle Eastern garb, his wife got up like
a college radical, in the Oval Office, with an American flag
burning in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the
wall. “Oh, man, you know what’d be really cool? Have them
exchanging a fist bump! Yeah!” And so it was added to the cartoon,
the final, current touch.
HAVE THESE PEOPLE NEVER SEEN a sporting event? Have they never seen
Tiger Woods exchange fist bumps with his caddie, Steve Williams?
The fist bump, indeed, is about the commonest and lowest level
congratulatory gesture in sports. Celebrities pick up on it in
pro-ams. A few weeks back, golfer Fred Funk used his wife Sharon as
his caddie, and they did it when Fred sank a nice putt.
The fist bump probably evolved as shorthand for a full-fledged
“soul” handshake: clasp up, clasp down, fist stack, reverse fist
stack, elbow, elbow, etc. There just isn’t time to go through the
whole rigmarole, especially in a sporting event, besides which the
routine changes depending on context.
Whatever, this completely ordinary, everyday American gesture
now carries no racial or political connotation. Contestants on game
shows fist bump. Kids playing soccer fist bump. Little Leaguers
fist bump. Oscar winners fist bump.
The gesture is so ordinary, in fact, that, until dubbed
“terrorist fist bump” by a cable show talkie, it did not even have
a name.
The only people who don’t do it? Terrorists. And maybe cable
show talkers, whose only frame of reference is television, and
their own careers in it.
