Excellent post. I wholeheartedly agree. Pretentiousness is so icky.
I would go as far as to say that it is downright unAmerican. "Pretentious" is what the European aristocrats do to distract themselves from their own irrelevance.
It wouldn't bother me nearly as much if there was some obvious explanation as to how he was clearly superior. Yeah, crap like that is one of the few things that really trips my trigger, almost as bad as people who assert that I've done well for myself because everything was handed to me on a silver platter. A true American is what they are, built from the ground up by their own efforts and courage, and little else. We lose as a country and as a culture when we view it any other way, and I'm not going to stand by and let socialist golems redefine what it means to be an American.