Jemal.co

This morn­ing I was watch­ing a video that a friend sent me on my iPhone as I walked around my house. As I wan­dered into the dark kitchen, I hes­i­tated to turn the lights on—I just stood there for a few sec­onds with my hand on the switch. And then I real­ized why I was stand­ing in the dark: because I wanted to hear better.

When I became aware of what I was think­ing I was shocked! How could I be so crazy? How could I think some­thing so stupid?

And then it occurred to me that this was actu­ally a pretty famil­iar feel­ing. This is not the first time I’ve noticed that my mind was doing some­thing dumb. I can’t remem­ber spe­cific exam­ples, but this kind of half-unconscious idiocy must have hap­pened dozens of times—and those are just the times I’ve noticed! How many times has my brain done some­thing colos­sally moronic with­out me notic­ing?

Does this hap­pen to you? Have you felt the sink­ing feel­ing that you’re being an idiot? Do you think it hap­pens to everyone?

And if so, why doesn’t it hap­pen to Rick Santorum?

I’ve always liked get­ting into argu­ments. And I don’t mean debates, I mean argu­ments. Knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred shout­ing matches. Care­fully weigh­ing mer­its and find­ing com­mon ground on the impor­tant issues of what­ever are not things I enjoy. It’s a lit­tle juve­nile, I admit, but what I like is prov­ing peo­ple wrong.

Of course, we all like the feel­ing of being right. I think it’s pretty well estab­lished that the most excit­ing emo­tion for most peo­ple — way beyond love, lust or hate — is right­eous indig­na­tion. Peo­ple don’t mind being aggrieved if they can show other peo­ple how right they are and how wrong some­one else is.

Don’t believe me? The next time you’re in a con­ver­sa­tion, lis­ten for the clues. When describ­ing a pic­nic, how much do peo­ple talk about the potato salad and how much do they talk about the ants? When peo­ple tell sto­ries about par­ties they run through the niceties in five sec­onds and skip right to what he said about her, what she poured on him and how long they spent clean­ing up what they both did to the bathroom.

But if you really enjoy that sort of thing, you can’t just wait around for peo­ple to throw up on your bath-mats. You have to get out there and pro­voke some­thing! In the old days that meant putting out a cig­a­rette in a stranger’s drink or telling the new guy that you don’t like the look on his face. And if you don’t mind get­ting punched in the face, those are still good start­ing points, but it’s much safer to stick to pol­i­tics, reli­gion and text editors.

I’ve always been a fast thinker. Even bet­ter, I talk fast. When I’m wrong, I usu­ally have a good — or at least funny — response quickly enough to turn things in my favor. I over­whelm peo­ple with words and points and jokes. I admit it: I don’t fight fair. Which means I almost always win.

My Achilles heel is the internet.

Not because it means that every­one has access to some stu­pid wealth of knowl­edge or because I have to argue against a higher cal­i­bre of oppo­nent. When you’re good at argu­ing, the facts don’t mat­ter. I blame HTTP.

The web, you see, is a state­less pro­to­col, which means that com­mu­ni­ca­tion is asyn­chro­nous. When you’re vis­it­ing a web­site, the server isn’t doing much of any­thing while you read — it just waits for the next per­son to come along and request a page. And in the same way, when you’re dis­cussing some­thing with some­body in a forum or a com­ments sec­tion, they aren’t sit­ting around watch­ing you type, they’re eat­ing their din­ner and putting gas in the car.

That means they have all the time in the world to think about what you’ve said, look up some facts, and pre­pare their response. You can’t inter­rupt them halfway through and start tear­ing their argu­ment to shreds before they can fin­ish a sen­tence. They get to com­plete their thoughts! Their ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble, pos­si­bly cor­rect thoughts! My speed advan­tage goes right out the window.

So I’ve adapted. And, part of what’s helped me the most is, para­dox­i­cally, being less of a jerk. Instead of going after peo­ple full-bore, hit­ting them with a blis­ter­ing, expletive-laden attack, I have to be more sub­tle. I have to rely on my humor and rhetoric.

One of the peo­ple who has been the most help­ful in my shift in strat­egy is Jay Smooth. His good-natured dis­po­si­tion com­bined with his abil­ity to make a seri­ous point in a fun way gives him a won­der­ful rhetor­i­cal style. But his best qual­ity, the one I’m still try­ing to get the hang of, is the way he defuses a sit­u­a­tion while still mak­ing his point. Watch this video on deal­ing with racists:

Isn’t that fan­tas­tic? How do you argue with that guy? He’s like the Mis­ter Rogers of “Take your white priv­i­lege and shove it.”

Sadly, I’m not mature enough to do what Jay does. I see peo­ple act­ing like racists, and I can’t help call­ing them racists. For instance, after read­ing a bunch of Lib­er­tar­ian nitwits (redun­dant, I know) on Twit­ter defend­ing Ron Paul, I was com­pelled to set up Is Ron Paul A Racist? And I know better!

Then, after see­ing those same peo­ple make the same stereo­typ­i­cal racist com­ments over and over, I found myself set­ting up You Might Be A Racist. Yes, it would be bet­ter to talk about what they did instead of what they are. I know.

But this way sure is a lot of fun.

UPDATE: Evi­dently, it’s also good for traffic:

A month ago, I bought a vest.

I know, I know, big deal. Lots of peo­ple buy vests. They sell them right along all the rest of the out­er­wear. Through­out the fall and spring, you can see peo­ple all over the place wear­ing them. My local mall is prac­ti­cally wall-to-wall vests this time of year. (Mostly North Face.)

The dif­fer­ence is that the major­ity of those peo­ple haven’t been say­ing that vests are a ter­ri­ble idea for the last 20 years.

Why? Well, where does your body get cold? Or more impor­tantly, where do you notice that you’re get­ting cold? Hands, right? Ears? Nose maybe? Feet? By the time you notice that your belly but­ton is cold, your fin­gers are too stiff to move. Have you ever heard any­one said, “I am so cold — feel the mid­dle of my back”? Me either. And I’ve never heard a man com­plain about his wife putting any­thing but her cold feet on him in her sleep. (There may be another expla­na­tion for that.)

The argu­ment you hear from vest-lovers is always the same: that by keep­ing your core warm, you’re keep­ing the rest of your body warm. The the­ory is that what warms your body is the blood pump­ing to it, so if your chest is warm, it’ll warm the rest of you. But how well does that work in practice?

I decided to check.

I bought a reg­u­lar out­door vest — it was on sale some­where online — and I started wear­ing it as the weather turned cold. I can tell you that it absolutely kept my chest warm. Almost uncom­fort­ably so, some­times. In fact, I’m sit­ting here in my slightly chilly base­ment writ­ing this while wear­ing my vest.

And my hands are FREEZING. I keep hav­ing to stop to rub them together in order to type this. I’m start­ing to think that vests are just a strat­egy to sell more gloves.

Keep in mind, that I’m not one of those cold-blooded peo­ple you know. I’m almost always the one per­son in any group with warm hands, and usu­ally the last per­son to com­plain about the cold. I’m what’s char­i­ta­bly known as a “big guy” or “barrel-chested.” And being a 6′, 235lb., 46R kind of guy helps me hold more heat than other people.

But this vest thing sucks.

So what’s the point of all of this?

I think if you polled my friends and co-workers, you’d find that I’m con­sid­ered (again, char­i­ta­bly) pretty opin­ion­ated. (The words, “hate-fueled ass­hole” and “cur­mud­geonly son-of-a-bitch” get thrown around a bit.) In fact, a few weeks ago at the office they were going to make a list of things I hate but instead made a list of things I like because they fig­ured it would be shorter. And while I don’t think that’s true, it is the case that I have more opin­ions about more things than most people.

I can explain in excru­ci­at­ing detail the things I hate about:

• Jazz after 1945
• Dogs
• Face­book
• Chi­ro­prac­tors
• Cru­cif­er­ous veg­eta­bles of the species oleracea
• Base­ball
• Strong typ­ing
• Pre­mil­len­ni­al­ism
• Linux on the desktop
• Pro­nounc­ing “either” with a long “i” sound
• Pink Floyd
• The movie Inception
• Pink Floyd fans
• Win­dows 7
• Soc­cer
• Almost any­thing pub­lished by DC Comics
• Home­opa­thy

(If I didn’t man­age to name some­thing you like in that list, please be assured that I could.)

But here’s the impor­tant thing: I know some­thing about all those top­ics. I own all 4 disks of Bitches Brew. I’ve read plenty of Jus­tice League. I’ve devel­oped a bunch of Face­book apps. Hell, I’ve been to more pro base­ball games in the last year than almost any­one I know. I’m wear­ing a vest. I’m not just some opin­ion­ated asshole.

I’m a well-informed asshole.

So when I tell some­body on Twit­ter that the Kin­dle Fire’s browser sucks, it’s impor­tant that they know that I’ve used the Fire since they day it was released. And con­versely, the rea­son I don’t hate Win­dows Phone 7 isn’t because it’s good — I just haven’t had the oppor­tu­nity to use it enough to hate it.

But I prob­a­bly will.

I spend a lot of time explain­ing my name to peo­ple. Part of that comes from hav­ing a name as unusual as Jemaled­din Sasha David Cole, and part of it is that I’m a pretty approach­able per­son. I have a hard time going gro­cery shop­ping alone with­out being asked to get some­thing heavy or on a high shelf into an old woman’s shop­ping cart. Peo­ple are always ask­ing me for direc­tions, even when I’m walk­ing around look­ing puz­zled by a tourist map. But most of it is that I have a bet­ter story than most people.

When she was a teenager, my mother read a book called “The Moun­tains of Allah” by Paul Chavchavadze. It’s a novel of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion about the dif­fer­ent eth­nic and reli­gious groups in the Cau­ca­sus and the adven­tures of a young French woman who moves there after the death of her par­ents. My mother loved the story and espe­cially loved the char­ac­ter meant to rep­re­sent famed (well, not famed here and now, but still pretty famed) Mus­lim leader Jemaled­din al-Afgani. She decided to name her even­tual son after him, as well as the Russ­ian (Sasha—short for Alexan­der) and Jew­ish (David) char­ac­ters. You see, these men were all men of faith, and my mother has always been a woman of faith.

Which all sounds pretty sweet until you remem­ber that we’re talk­ing about sad­dling a lit­tle white kid with Jemaled­din Sasha David.

In the years since, I’ve advo­cated pretty stren­u­ously that hip­pies not be allowed to name chil­dren, or at least not right away. If a mid­wife notices a strong smell of patchouli dur­ing the deliv­ery, she could hold off on pass­ing out the name forms until every­one involved has had some time to sober up.

Mind you, it hasn’t always been a ball of laughs. At some point my par­ents real­ized that oppor­tu­ni­ties for bul­ly­ing were min­i­mal for a white Jemal in Seat­tle and moved to Chicago. (They claim to have had other rea­sons, but I don’t think they hold much water.) After the city kids in Chicago and New York had got­ten their licks in, my par­ents moved us to the Upper Penin­sula of Michi­gan where the local hill­bil­lies not only gave me shit for my name, but beat me up for hav­ing red hair because, in their cos­mopoli­tan expe­ri­ence, only girls had red hair.

Argu­ing that either A) if I were a girl they shouldn’t hit me, or B) if I wasn’t a girl they had no rea­son to hit me, got me labelled a nerd. Hill­bil­lies do not appre­ci­ate rhetoric or the use of the sub­junc­tive mood. That’s infor­ma­tion that really informed my under­stand­ing of the broader pub­lic dis­course. Unlike many peo­ple, I was not sur­prised by those Tea Party signs.

Hav­ing this name in the U.P. taught me other things as well. In mid­dle school I learned how soon you should fall down when a high school kid is punch­ing you (very soon), and what to do once you hit the ground. You see, curl­ing up in the fetal posi­tion is good, but mak­ing sure your stom­ach is fac­ing towards him with your hands on your ears and elbows in front of your face as close to your knees as pos­si­ble is the key. Being kicked in the kid­neys is no fun, and you can block most of the kicks to the stom­ach if you go down before you start get­ting all cotton-brained from the punches.

The ben­e­fits of a pub­lic edu­ca­tion, everybody!

It was then that I tried to con­vince my fam­ily to call me David, but an after­noon of my dad say­ing, “can you pass the sugar, Daaaaaaaaaave?” ended that notion.

In the years since I got too tall for kids to feel I was an easy tar­get, being a Jemal has actu­ally been ben­e­fi­cial. In High School, some­body in the office saw my name and GPA and signed me up for every local African-American schol­ar­ship oppor­tu­nity. Try­ing to col­lect those never worked out, but it was nice hear­ing my name on the morn­ing announce­ments. And the look on my face after my principal—who I met with on a weekly basis for sev­eral years—couldn’t pro­nounce my name dur­ing grad­u­a­tion got me on the poster for the com­pany that sells pic­tures of you col­lect­ing your diploma.

Once the Inter­net became a way to meet peo­ple with­out hav­ing any idea what they look like, I learned that I have to tell peo­ple I’m white before arrang­ing to meet them in per­son. It’s a lit­tle awk­ward, but that way I don’t have to walk up to every per­son in a pub­lic place and say, “If you’re wait­ing for a black guy named Jemal, I’m him!” And get­ting good at hav­ing awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions is a reward in itself. It sure has made par­ent­ing a teenager easier.

Being a white Jemal has made air travel in the post-9/11 era a lit­tle tricky. The folks at pass­port con­trol always look at me like I’m the next John Walker Lindh, so I down­play the named-after-a-Muslim-leader aspects of my story and play up the “hip­pies, amirite?” parts. Those folks really do not like hippies.

Prob­a­bly the most fun thing about this name is the expe­ri­ence my wife has got­ten play­ing, “what kind of reac­tion will I get when I say my husband’s name is Jemal?” When we were dat­ing, a solid 60% of peo­ple she talked to had either an uncom­fort­able or down­right racist reac­tion to hear­ing she was with “Jemal.” Once she rec­og­nized the signs, she’d hit them with, “Yeah, it’s an Arab name” for that xeno­pho­bic twist. (Tell me more about this post-racial America.)

With all that said, I’ve come to love my name. As much of a pain as it’s been, the story has given me a great ice­breaker when meet­ing new peo­ple. Bet­ter yet, it’s very easy to get my first name as my user­name on any given web­site. If I’m on a ser­vice, you’ll find me as jemaleddin.

Good luck get­ting your name every time, Daaaaaaaaaave.