Friday, May 11, 2012
Some Smart Girls Are Easy
In college I sometimes used a very esoteric poet I had just read and studied to try (and, alas, usually to fail) to get smart girls to sleep with me. With Neruda I had minor success. I've used T. S. Eliot, just as our President did with the non-composit girlfriend Alex McNear (except I memorized The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock rather than The Waste Land, there's nothing sexy about The Waste Land). I think Obama's Eliot ploy worked. He seems to have snowed Ms. McNear as well as Meghan Daum, who writes hagiographically (and apparently without a trace of self awareness of how silly she sounds) about the question her piece's headline poses: Is Obama "Too brainy to be president?"
I'm not making this up; it's real. Go here to see.
Here is the college brilliance of our President, preserved by Ms. McNear and as quoted but Ms. Daum:
Ms. Daub's breathless work here is just another version of the President is the smartest man to ever hold the office.
Yeah, right.
Until I see his SATs and his transcripts from Occidental and Columbia, he is a 100 IQ Chance the Gardener and certainly the worst President we've had to suffer though since Wilson.
I'm not making this up; it's real. Go here to see.
Here is the college brilliance of our President, preserved by Ms. McNear and as quoted but Ms. Daum:
He calls "The Waste Land" "an ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats" and encourages McNear to "read [Eliot's] essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he's less concerned with depicting moribund Europe.... Remember how I said there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — Eliot is of this type."[What does Münzer (Müntzer?) have to do with The Waste Land? I say nothing at all, but I'm apparently less brainy than the President, or Ms. McNear or Ms. Daum, although I'm not the only one to think the quoted portions are both pretentious and a little vapid.]
Ms. Daub's breathless work here is just another version of the President is the smartest man to ever hold the office.
Yeah, right.
Until I see his SATs and his transcripts from Occidental and Columbia, he is a 100 IQ Chance the Gardener and certainly the worst President we've had to suffer though since Wilson.
Labels: T. S. Eliot; President Obama; Meghan Daum
