Thanks Jeb Bush. You just made my life as a Jeb even harder

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/16/thanks-jeb-bush-make-life-harder

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Now that Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for president of the United States, he has ended the long process of pretending to be conflicted about a potential candidacy so he could collect untold amounts of money. His candidacy means pretty much what you think it means: deficit reduction via tax cuts and military expansion, a pro-liberty hands-off government for all except those who offend God-botherers. Jeb will be just like his brother, except different.

But there is one group on whom his candidacy will have severe impacts – one you have likely not thought of. I speak, of course, of the Jebs.

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I’ve written in the past about my personal resentment of his acronymic name (it’s John Ellis Bush, making “Jeb Bush” a redundancy on par with “ATM Machine”), but I realized that I couldn’t in good conscience resent his representation of Jebness while presuming to speak for all Jebs myself. Thus, I reached out to the only two other Jebs I could find. Besides both being acronymic Jebs – named in infancy like Bush – their lives, nomenclatively speaking, might as well be my own.

“This is my life, since forever”, says Jeb Boniakowski, a 35-year-old New Jerseyan and developer at Whisper. “‘What’s your name?’ they ask. ‘Jeb. J-E-B.’ I just spell it, off the bat. And the first thing they always as is: ‘Is that short for Jebediah?’”

“That’s the first thing”, says Jeb Boone, a 28-year-old Augusta, Georgia native and journalist for the GlobalPost. “You introduce yourself, and they say, ‘Well, hey, Jebediah.’ I get Jebediah all the time. And Jebediah means you’re just a complete cracker running a moonshine still in Dalton, Georgia.” Even before Jeb Bush, the name comes freighted with assumptions, like that you’re a hillbilly, or from a super religious family.

Now that Jeb Bush is a national figure, there are some side benefits for us. Both Jebs and I have a slightly easier time on the phone telling someone who would otherwise call us Jeff, Jed, Jim, Jen, Jess, Jan, Jet or (really) Zeb that it’s “like Jeb Bush.” And one time in 1994, I came home from a vacation to find my high school buddies had converted my front lawn into a graveyard for stolen “Jeb!” campaign signs. But those benefits take a backseat to the negatives.

“My dad was a well-known public defender and known as like the lone liberal of Augusta”, says Boone, “and kids in my middle school knew that and would call me Jeb Bush to pick on me as the son of a flaming liberal no one could stand. Am I going to relive this until 2017? Do I have to be Jeb Bush again? Am I going to feel like I’m playing dodgeball in the gym again?”

“Now I explain that my name comes from my initials, and everyone I meet now is like: ‘Oh, like Jeb Bush’”, says Boniakowski. “And the thing is, it’s exactly like Jeb Bush. And I don’t like that idea. I realize it’s petty, but it’s like the Michael Bolton thing from Office Space. He’s the one who sucks.”

One would think that people wouldn’t ascribe similar politics to two people based on name alone, but its uniqueness seems to fuse Jebs together in some people’s minds. In the same way that people in my 7th grade class assumed that the only other Jeb in school and I must share the same phone number and would call and leave messages for us more or less interchangeably, there seems to be this attitude, as Boniakowski puts it: “in some illogical way, we have to be the same guy. I mean, there just can’t be two.”

Someone named Scott will never be asked to answer for Scott Walker, or mistaken for him. Yet I’ve found myself at parties obligated to explain to strangers that I am not Jeb Bush. And not every problem of perception belongs to someone else; we are just as guilty. Unlike Mikes and Jennifers who have lived amid a sea of Mikes and Jennifers their entire lives, I have never heard my name spoken aloud without reflexively assuming someone was addressing me.

Every new critical tweet that uses Jeb as a shorthand for Jeb Bush sends me into a moment of panic, making me wonder: did I tweet something bad and not realize it? And even then, I feel a strange compulsion to respond, as if in some non-hashtagged way, to assert, #NotAllJebs.

I am not the only Jeb to feel this way. “When I [see a tweet and] realize it’s not about me, I immediately want to respond to it as if they were talking about me,” says Boone. “I tried responding a few times, and I think everyone just thinks it’s stupid.”“My heart races for a second when I see mean things in my interactions before I see that they’re not about me,” says Boniakowski.

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Of anyone, Boniakowski has it worst of all. Because of his tech job, he needed to register a Twitter handle as part of a project his former company was working on. As luck would have it, the name @Jeb wasn’t taken, so he registered it. And while having your own first name as your Twitter handle comes with enough cachet in Silicon Valley that other people mention it around him in hushed tones at developer conferences, the “all Jebs must be the same” downside now literally dominates his user experience.

“There’s very little real stuff in my notifications; they’re all Jeb Bush related. They’re 80% Republicans who use too many hashtags and think he’s not conservative enough. There’s a whole aesthetic to Tea Party Twitter that’s just crying eagle avatars. My mentions tab now is all crying eagles and [‘support our troops’] yellow ribbons. There’s a lot of that ‘Why Isn’t There A White History Month?’ conservative Twitter stuff in there. Now it’s way more political, and it’s increasing.”

That’s another thing many, but #NotAllJebs can agree on. Jeb Bush – our nemesis (namesis?) – is going to drag us down with him.

“It’s going to get a lot worse,” says Boone. “It’s going to be cute for a little while, but then it’s going to be a grind. One more bullshit thing I have to deal with everyday.”