If there’s one truth about me, it’s that I want to be cool – desperately cool.
I’m very good at paying attention to all the new fads, so I can know everything I’m missing out on. And I know for a fact that I’ll be on Easy Street once I reach my coolness goals.
My last golden ticket, concern over the conditions in Africa, had started to grow stale. I needed to find a new one and, as luck would have it, I found it right here on campus.
I was eating lunch at the Beach Hut when I saw someone walk past with a weird scarf thing on. I didn’t know what it was, only that it looked really cool. I took a mental note, finished my day at school and ran home to research “weird scarf things” on Google.
I had seen them around before but never really knew what to make of them. I didn’t even know what they were called, until Google informed me that they’re called “keffiyehs.” Not only did this answer my initial question, but Google also supplied me with pictures of cool celebrities wearing them, like Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West and Matt Lauer.
But Google didn’t stop there. Apparently, keffiyehs have a long, storied history. Did you know that T.E. Lawrence wore one? I didn’t. So did Yasser Arafat. That one was actually kind of weird, so I dug even deeper.
It would seem that keffiyehs come with a catch, of course.
I’m not an anti-Semite by any means. I love Jewish people. One of my friends is Jewish. That’s why it was so distressing for me to find out that my precious keffiyehs are a symbol of the anti-Semitism that I’m not sure I want defining me, no matter how rad they may look.
To be honest with you, I don’t really get it. It’s just a scarf thing. It’s not like I’m keeping a list on it of all the Jewish people I’ve done mean stuff to. It’s just cloth. To which, of course, you might reply, “And a swastika is just a Buddhist symbol for good luck.” Which, actually, is a pretty good point.
There are plenty of symbols in the world that are more than just what they seem on surface inspection. If I were to show you my ring or index or pinky finger, you probably wouldn’t think much of it. But if I were to show you my middle finger, you might get upset. It’s really no different than the other three, but you might.
So I won’t show it to you unless I intend to get you upset. There are words like this, too. They’re nothing more than strung together vowels and consonants and yet they become so much more when you put them together the right way. Or wrong way, as it were.
Cameron Diaz, who’s pretty cool, recently got in trouble in Peru when she was seen carrying a bag with a Maoist slogan printed on it. That’s no good in Peru, where the Shining Path launched an internal conflict that claimed almost 70,000 lives. Diaz would later apologize, saying that she was unaware of what she was doing. How could she have known? She’s not a Peruvian historian.
It’s that damn Google’s fault. Ignorance is bliss and if it hadn’t told me what it told me, I could’ve bought a keffiyeh and started living the good life. As it is, I’m stuck with my lame clothes and my lame shoes and my lame life.
Stephen Sabetti is a senior journalism major and a copy editor and contributing writer for the Daily Forty-Niner.
