By Rachel Sauer
The Palm Beach Post
There it is, at the end of an outstretched arm, the exclamation point on top of a fist. So pert. So geometric, all right-angle precision. Thumbs up!
Clap, clap, clap. Thumbs up! Wave, wave, wave. Thanks, folks. Thumbs up!
Sometimes it’s just thumb up, like those winking chef statues outside paper napkin Italian restaurants. One thumb up, but the meaning is the same.
Thumbs up: the hand gesture of choice for an army of presidential candidates. Thumbs up, Mike Huckabee! Thumbs up, Hillary Clinton! Thumbs up, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney!
The thumbs up is an immediate yes, a show of strength (but not too much, no sucker punches here), the ultimate positive affirmation.
Everything is good, says the thumbs up, or will be as soon as you elect me president.
Onward to the future, says the thumbs up.
Yes. YES! The thumbs up does the shouting.
It’s not like the candidates have much choice in the matter.
A raised fist? This says let’s invade Poland, or march downtown and set stuff on fire. It’s a little too angry, a little too aggressive – strong in a way that’s intimidating. Fists are for punching holes in drywall.
The raised fist’s cousin, two raised fists, is even more impossible. Two raised fists is the gesture of playoff winners and 19-year-olds who just completed a keg stand. Two raised fists hints at unseemly ego, invariably accompanied by a “woo-hoo!” And woo-hoo does not fix the economy, people.
The two-finger V? Stolen by Richard Nixon and the hippies. Not even Winston Churchill could retrieve it from infamy.
The A-OK, with the index finger and thumb forming a circle and the other three fingers a jaunty sunburst behind, is too frivolous, too Sunshine Family, acceptable only among scuba divers – for whom a thumbs up means trouble.
Finger guns? Forget it. One gun says, “I’m 5, and you’re under arrest.” Two finger guns call you baby and welcome you to the waterbed sales convention. The Hang-10 sign? Save it for the skate park.
And we need not even mention the index-and-pinkie finger bull horns, favored by University of Texas cheerleaders and Queens of the Stone Age fans. Anything that might also be called devil horns, and show up in a million Facebook photos featuring shirtless, tongue-wagging spring breakers, has no place on the campaign trail.
So thumbs up to the thumbs up.
You’d think John McCain’s thumbs were frozen perpendicular to his other fingers, so often does he flash them. A show of spunky optimism? Perhaps. Hillary Clinton strides on stage with a clap, clap, clap, thumbs up! The clapping says “hooray for America, we’re all in this together” and “no, folks, it’s really about you.” The thumbs up is a punchy little yes, a “seriously, folks, I mean it.”
Historians may quibble, but conventional wisdom says an emperor’s thumbs up meant Roman gladiators would live to fight another day.
(Tidbit: Roger Ebert gave the movie Gladiator two stars, the equivalent of a thumbs down.)
In a much swooned-over Top Gun poster, Tom Cruise as Maverick flashes a thumbs up. So confident! So heroic!
It’s a crude gesture in parts of Greece, Iran, Australia, Sardinia, Russia and some west African countries, according to Roger E. Axtell’s Gestures: The Do’s and Taboos of Body Language Around the World.
But this is not Sardinia, it’s America, and the battle for its presidency is waged in the oomph behind that thumbs up. In its ubiquity, it means everything or nothing at all.
A thumbs up that would be worth noting: by the side of the road, hitching a ride. No campaign buses, no parades, no proclamations about What America Is and What It Needs. Just a thumb and a stretch of Highway 101, all of America laid out beside it.
Or better yet, that same thumb raised to mouth as an impromptu microphone, should a hairbrush not be readily available. Politician in the bathroom, belting out A Little Less Conversation – this would be a thumb up to consider, a thumb attached to a Human rather than a Candidate.
The thumbs are up, but it remains to see where they’re pointing.