Where Does Homophobic Pat Get Off, Saying That Pete Buttigieg's French Sucks?

I hate to even link to Pat’s blog, but here it is. It’s great if you like reading horrific takes. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, recently announced that he’s running for president along with every other person on earth. Except he’s pretty unique: bitch he went to Harvard, then he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, then he joined the Navy, and then he came out as gay. Not sure about the order but who cares. So that’s a lot of cool things, unless you hate intelligence, the military, and gay people, which is a rare combination.

Then here comes Pat, shunning Pete Buttichug’s French as if he knows a goddamn thing about it. “Far too many “uhh’s and umm’s” to be considered fluent and that’s coming from a guy who speaks zero French,” says Pat, who went to UMass and never France. Buddy… the “ehms” of French are as intrinsic to the language as “you know” and “like” are to English. It’s a thinking sound. If you ever hear French without at least a few “ehms,” that person is an imposter and should be denied entry to the country.

Would a Frenchman know that Pete isn’t a native speaker? C’est sur. But do you know how hard it is for an American to learn and speak flawless French? Almost impossible. It took me years. I spent three separate summers playing soccer in Bordeaux with a bunch of French kids—none of whom spoke English. I had to shower with them after “l’entraînement” (training) twice a day. Do you know how alienating it feels to take your first all-nude, all-dude showers with the only circumcised hog of the bushel? They called me “garçon de champignon” (boy of mushroom) and then they would pee on each other, which I thought was totally fucked, and only one of those statements isn’t true. The toilets from that camp still give me nightmares. No lids. It looked like that movie Black Hawk Down.

Did I write this entire blog to remind you that I speak fluent and flawless French? Sure, among many reasons. I also wrote it to contrast Pat’s uncultured ear with mine, and to remind the gay community that I’m a stronger ally than the artist formerly known as Gay Pat.

With all that said, I do have a boner to pick:

While his French is very solid, his piano is weak. People shouting “he’s a classical pianist!” Fuck that. I searched high and low for some evidence of Pete’s classical repertoire, and all I found were these dingy clips of elementary rock piano. That rendition of Spoon’s “The Way We Get By” is so simple and clunky that I actually feel bad for Pete. I can’t imagine playing the instrument with so little class. Nor can I remember a time when I played that way, for it must have come before my brain was capable of forming memories. There’s athlete funny, and there’s funny. There’s politician piano, and there’s piano. Pete, I love you for trying, but you are politician piano.

Solid French though.