I do so enjoy reading our new buddy, Michael Knox Beran, who waxes philosophical every time he gets a boner over each and every  Tea Bagger FemBot who wanders down the pike. One imagines him sitting in a large comfy leather chair in his book-lined study, idly flipping through many an expensive tome seeking out a lyrical mot juste with which to honor the latest lady of his loins. Finding it, he closes his eyes in silent reverie while gently swirling his snifter of cognac, savoring the moment before  masturbating like a capuchin monkey on a weekend Viagra bender.

But haven’t we all been there before?

A recurrent theme in his writings  (which is to say the two things of his that I’ve bothered to read after going through the box scores on ESPN and, of course, Marmaduke. I confess, Brad Anderson is my muse) is his disdain for “the elites”, often given voice by these sloe-eyed ladies of the hinterlands, these succubi of the  state college system.

Here he is transported to Raptureville, (Population: him) by an extraordinary exchange between Falafel Bill O’Reilly and snowtrash grifter Sarah Palin:

Palin Populism
Sarah Palin takes on the pathology of the elites.

BILL O’REILLY: Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?

SARAH PALIN: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of spinelessness, that perhaps is made up for with some kind of elite Ivy League education . . .

– The O’Reilly Factor, Nov. 21, 2009

No sooner had I lighted on this exchange than the familiar words of Faust — familiar, at any rate, to us Ivy Leaguers, for whom he is something of a patron saint — were on my tongue:

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin . . .

I have, alas, studied philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And worst of all theology
With keen endeavor, through and through —
And here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before.

He then goes on to cite Edmund Wilson, Emerson, William Ewart Gladstone, Swift, Lionel Trilling, Paul Goodman, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Burke to support his point about all of those smartypants elitists who think they are all that and a bag of Vol-au-vents. One would have thought Beran would pulled out the big guns and gone with a little Brooks & Dunn to make his populist ecce signum :

She wears snakeskin boots made by Calvin Klein
And cheap sunglasses from the five and dime
All the other girls in school they give her dirty looks
She got an “A” in math and never cracked a book
Sure looks good in her denim and pearls
Rock my world little Country girl

Word to your Mahler.