GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM: Pete Buttigieg, intellectual god.
This is the story we are fed in Wired, which used to cover emerging technology long ago and far away. I even subscribed for a year, on one of those ridiculous $4/year deals you occasionally get. That was more than 20 years ago if I remember correctly, but whatever.
THE CURIOUS MIND of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.
As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard’s Spring—though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.
Uh, what? Did nobody tell the author, Virginia Heffernan, that Buttigieg is a married gay man and likely not interested in the obvious crush she has on him?
Charles Cooke has an excellent parody of Heffernan’s hagiography: I Love Pete Buttigieg.
As he speaks, I admire his humility — a humility, I daresay, that might serve him well one day in the White House. I admire his common touch, too. For the next hour, the aide repeatedly returns to the door, but, despite his increasing agitation, Buttigieg dismisses him each time so that we can finish our chat. I feel special, seen, and heard — feelings that, in an age of MAGA, I haven’t felt for a long time.
He is listing the most common knots one might expect to find on a mahogany table when, unable to take it any more, I blurt out what I’m thinking. “Sir,” I shout, “I love you more than word can wield the matter / Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty / Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare / No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor / As much as child e’er loved, or father found / A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable / Beyond all manner of so much I love you.”
“Yes,” he says, nodding.
Eventually, I have to leave. On my way in from Baltimore, I hit a pothole in central Washington, D.C., so I’m flying back while my car is in the shop. There are still a couple of hours before my plane leaves, and we’re quite close to the airport, but I was advised to get there early in case the security lines are long. You know how transportation is these days.
Shouldn’t socialists be able to actually make the trains run on time before being feted with Heffernan’s level of a puff piece? Or as Jon Gabriel asked in February: Sec. Buttigieg … What Would You Say You Do Here?