SKILL INDIA

As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in earlyspring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of hiscognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritanhistoriography, 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 ideasabout three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.Because Buttigieg, at 41, is an old millennial; because as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he got afirst in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), the trademark degree for Labour-party elitesof the Tony Blair era; because he worked optimizing grocery-store pricing at McKinsey; becausehe joined the Navy in hopes of promoting democracy in Afghanistan; because he gotgay-married to his partner Chasten in 2018; and because, as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, heagitated to bring hipster entrepreneurism and “high-tech investment” to his rust-belt hometown, Ihad to ask him about neoliberalism, the happy idea that consumer markets and liberaldemocracy will always expand, and will always expand together. I was also fascinated by theway that Buttigieg, who has long described himself as obsessed with technology and data, hasresponded to the gendering of tech, and especially green tech, by fearsome culture warriors,including Marjorie Taylor Greene.Buttigieg, whose father was a renowned Marxist scholar, washimself a devotee of Senator Bernie Sanders as a young man. He now recognizes that thepersistence of far-right ideology, with its masculinist and antidemocratic preoccupations, is partof the reason that neoliberalism has come undone. Not everyone, it seems, even wants a risingstandard of living if it means they have to accept the greater enfranchisement of undesirables,including, of course, women, poor people, Black people, and the usual demons in the sights ofthe world’s Ted Cruzes and Tucker Carlsons.He also talked about his faith. Lefties these days are said to be less religious than right-wingevangelicals, but between Buttigieg, whose Episcopalianism grounds his decisionmaking, andhis boss, President Joe Biden, whose robust Catholicism drives his sincere effort to reviveAmerica’s soul, perhaps a religious left is rising again.Pete Buttigieg, the only child of JenniferAnne (Montgomery) and Joseph Anthony Buttigieg II, was born on January 19, 1982, in SouthBend, Indiana. His mother uses the name Anne Montgomery. His parents met and married whileemployed as faculty at New Mexico State University.Last name is pronounced “boot-edge-edge.” It is the designation for “poultry” in Maltese, aSemitic language.He was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana from January 1, 2012 until January 1, 2020.Announced his candidacy for the 2020 US presidential election in January 2019. He is the firstopenly gay Democratic presidential candidate.Came out as gay in an essay published in the South Bend Tribune in June 2015. Served seven months in Afghanistan in the Navy Reserves while also serving as mayor ofSouth Bend.Met his eventual husband Chasten on the dating app Hinge.Son of Jennifer Ann (Montgomery), a professor, and Joseph Anthony Buttigieg II, a literaryscholar, professor, and translator. His father was an emigrant from Hamrun, Malta. His mother,whose family is from Indiana and Oklahoma, is of English, Scottish, German, and more distantSwiss-German, Welsh, and Cornish, descent.Spent several months working on Senator John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, where hespecialized in policy.His father passed away eight days after his 37th birthday.In November 2016, President Barack Obama included him on a short list of gifted, risingDemocrats.Taught himself Norwegian in order to read Erlend Loe’s “Naïve. Super” in its original language.Later started periodically attending a Norwegian church in Chicago to keep up.Plays the piano.

He became the first openly gay person to win a presidential nominating contest, as well as thefirst to win delegates, when he won the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2020.Said to bear a resemblance to Logan Lerman, and also to fictional character Alfred E. Neuman.Portrayed by Colin Jost on Saturday Night Live (1975). Jost and Buttigieg attended Harvard atthe same time and lived in the same dormitory at one point, though they had never spokendirectly until Buttigieg interviewed Jost for his podcast in 2020.U.S. Secretary of Transportation (2021 – present).[10/15, 22:27] SKILL INDIA: Julius CaesarGaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate,Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in acivil war, and subsequently became dictator from 49 BC until his assassination in 44 BC. Caesarchanged the course of the history of the Greco-Roman world decisively and irreversibly. TheGreco-Roman society has been extinct for so long that most of the names of its great menmean little to the average, educated modern person. But Caesar’s name, like Alexander’s, is stillon people’s lips throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds. Even people who know nothing ofCaesar as a historic personality are familiar with his family name as a title signifying a ruler whois in some sense uniquely supreme or paramount—the meaning of Kaiser in German, tsar in theSlavonic languages, and qayṣar in the languages of the Islamic world.Caesar’s gens (clan) name, Julius (Iulius), is also familiar in the Christian world, for in Caesar’slifetime the Roman month Quintilis, in which he was born, was renamed “July” in his honour.This name has survived, as has Caesar’s reform of the calendar. The old Roman calendar wasinaccurate and manipulated for political purposes. Caesar’s calendar, the Julian calendar, is stillpartially in force in the Eastern Orthodox Christian countries, and the Gregorian calendar, now inuse in the West, is the Julian, slightly corrected by Pope Gregory XIII.Caesar’s gens, the Julii,were patricians—i.e., members of Rome’s original aristocracy, which had coalesced in the 4thcentury BCE with a number of leading plebeian (commoner) families to form the nobility that hadbeen the governing class in Rome since then. By Caesar’s time, the number of survivingpatrician gentes was small; and in the gens Julia the Caesares seem to have been the onlysurviving family. Though some of the most powerful noble families were patrician, patrician blood was no longer a political advantage; it was actually a handicap, since a patrician wasdebarred from holding the paraconstitutional but powerful office of tribune of the plebs. The JuliiCaesares traced their lineage back to the goddess Venus, but the family was not snobbish orconservative-minded.