Time & Perspective Quote by John Barth

Power, Barth suggests, rarely wears a uniform or signs its name in ink. It moves sideways: in private rooms, on golf courses, in backchannel phone calls, in the quiet nod that signals membership. “Secret handshakes” is a deliberately cheeky image, half boys-club comedy and half indictment. It shrinks grand historical myths to something intimate and faintly ridiculous: not heroic generals or visionary lawmakers, but networks, favors, and gatekeeping rituals. The line’s bite comes from that mismatch. History likes to dress itself up as necessity and principle; Barth points at the mechanism underneath and calls it social choreography.

The subtext isn’t that battles and bills don’t matter. It’s that their meaning is often pre-written elsewhere. Wars still require bodies; legislation still requires votes. But the decisive act is frequently who gets invited to the table, who’s allowed to speak, who already agrees before the meeting begins. “Proclamations” are the theatrical curtain call after the real drama has ended backstage. Barth, a novelist attuned to systems and scripts, treats public events as narrative artifacts: clean arcs built from messy, negotiated drafts.

Contextually, this fits a late-20th-century American sensibility shaped by the Cold War, Watergate, and the steady revelation that institutions run on informal power as much as formal rules. The quote works because it refuses comfort. It asks readers to notice how legitimacy is manufactured: not just by force or law, but by belonging. The handshake isn’t merely secret; it’s selective.