Hayseed in the City
Long before he was a war veteran and big town Mayor, Buttigieg was a country bumpkin on his own in a big city for the first time. By his admission, he would later recognize that Boston is hardly a big city comparatively speaking, but his description upon first moving there to go to college is like something out of a movie:
“There were the teenage punks, their expressions just a little too bored to be menacing, who loitered with skateboards off the entrance to the station. Always, someone would be passing out flyers, usually for something edgy like a Lyndon LaRouche for President rally or a Chomsky talk down at MIT. Nearby, at Au Bon Pain, lingered a mix of postdocs, autodidact geniuses, and drifters. Some of the outdoor tables had chessboards built into them, one permanently occupied by a man with a little sign inviting you to PLAY THE CHESS MISTER. Looking up overhead, I could note the time on a lighted display over the Cambridge Savings Bank building.”
Buttigieg
With a name like Buttigieg, you have to be concerned when you decide to run for President. Except that “Mayor Pete” didn’t seem all that concerned with nobody knowing how to pronounce his name. Turns out there is a reason for that lack of concern. He grew up in an atmosphere where his name, though distinctive, didn’t exactly stand out as difficult:
“The roster of local elected candidates around here is like a tour of Eastern Europe: Niezgodski, Zakas, Kovach, Wesolowski. For every black, German, or Irish candidate with a name like Morton, Davis, Dieter, Bauer, or O’Brien, there was a Kubsch, Kruczynski, Kostielney, or Grzegorek. Most illustrative of all was the former County Councilman Randy Przybysz, pronounced something like `sheepish’ and spelled without the involvement of a single vowel.”
Justice, Rawls-Style
Buttigieg is an acolyte of the theory of justice forwarded by a legendary figure on the subject, John Rawls. He turns to the philosophy of Rawls to situate his own position on the subject of equality and fairness within society. The image at the end is as effective as it simple:
“a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world…this vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.”
A Different Kind of War
Buttigieg is a military veteran, but his most effective use of imagery in describing a war zone describes a place and a war far away from Islamic militants in the desert. The economic war which ravaged South Bend and the surrounding region was ever bit as costly to human life as the Desert Storm. Except that the casualties were all American:
“I scarcely even asked about the enormous brick structure with the even taller white smokestack that we would pass after the turn onto Elwood Avenue. Ghostly, it presided over the junction where our residential area met the strip mall containing our go-to grocery store, along with Osco Drug, a Little Caesar’s, and a Laundromat...go around the back of that giant brick brewery to explore the parking lot, bounded by an ex-railroad with waist-high weeds poking up between the ties, and look up at the several stories of ruin, with one outer wall gone completely, exposing floors in naked cross-section like you’d see in footage of war zones, topped by inexplicable trees growing from somewhere on the fifth floor.”
