Good Morning.
The hottest candidate on the campaign trail right now is also, at the age of thirty-seven, the youngest. He is the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame. He graduated from Harvard, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He was first elected mayor at the age of twenty-nine with 74% of the vote and was reelected in 2014 with 80%. He is one of the most knowledgeable candidates among the growing Democratic field and articulates his positions with refreshing clarity. His last name is Buttigieg and all the pundits are learning how to pronounce it which makes the name a serious marketing tool. One of the cable news anchors recently had a cheat sheet in front of her with the name spelled phonetically, and my best effort is something like BOO - ti- gidge. He is often referred to as Mayor Pete so the last name can be avoided, but even that increases his exposure. For the record, Buttigieg is Maltese in origin, and the mayor speaks the language, along with Spanish, Italian, French, Norwegian, and Arabic. He, unlike many Americans, is fascinated with languages other than English. He appears to have
the same attitude towards people.
The guy is obviously a brilliant, interesting, and groundbreaking candidate. His last name could be something common and easily pronounced. He has a husband rather than a wife and could have avoided the political limelight like the plague that it certainly can be. Not this guy, and in my world of Medicare and with plenty of time to contemplate the human condition, Mayor Pete sends a big fat message that it's time to grow up and figure out a way to stop the nastiness that is tearing the country apart.
Prejudice often begins with a name that evokes an immediate suspiciousness. I leafed through the phone book and picked out a few that are particularly fascinating. How about these beauties...Alamayehu, Chleborad, Prawdzik, and Vrchota. I also landed on Different Horse, easy to say but not likely, at this point in time, to be seen on a ballot. Probably not the rest of the list either.
We travel to Mexico for a week on the beach, we go on a safari in Kenya, we do a tea ceremony in Japan, and we eat until we explode in Tuscany, but we still wonder if it's better to sound and be like the crowd that got off the boat in 1620. During the 2008 campaign, my husband read a letter to the editor from some old boy who grumped that he wasn't about to have a president whose name ended in a vowel, and a few minutes later, Mr. N cancelled our newspaper subscription. After the inauguration of the man with the name ending in a, we were at a dinner party where one of the guests had no problem stating aloud that it was just not right that a black family was living in the White House, whereupon Mr. N practically choked on his leg of lamb plated on Wedgewood and made it clear when we got home that he was fed up with the blather we had to endure at nearly every social occasion we attended. Imagine now a couple named Buttigieg - they opted to share the mayor's name - taking up residence at 1600. Hey, I'd love to be at the first state dinner. I love tuxedoes.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
P. S. My maiden name was White. Boring.
Comments