Mendel Illness

One of the awesome things about having grown old is being able to differentiate the battles you might be able to win from those you haven’t a prayer of winning. I have realized this week that it’s futile to rage, rage against the dying of the light of American voter intelligence, have heard the grass growing, have read the writing on the wall. It’s every person for himself now, and I will tender no apology for having slinked over to the other side last night while most of my neighbors were watching wrestling.

I have spent the past 12 hours since joining the Sarah 2012 campaign feeling not only unashamed, but in fact lighter than air. I’d had no inkling how liberating it would feel to embrace someone with as clear a vision as Sarah’s. In the past, I have always had grave doubts when she has spoken of common sense conservatism, because it reminded me of Ronald Reagan. But now, as I look back, I realize that the Reagan years really were very good ones for America. I still had my looks in those days — oh, did I! For the first half of his presidency, I was very happily married to a woman I’d fancied from afar for ages. I was driving a little automobile that I really liked, a Renault Le Car, and felt certain that at any moment I would regain the fame and fortune that I’d enjoyed early in the previous decade. Reagan was handsome and comfortable behind a lectern or dais, and there was no denying that I’d much enjoyed several of the motion pictures in which he’d starred — A Hard Day’s Night, On the Waterfront, Citizen Kane, and what have you.

Having a physically attractive leader buoys the national spirit, without our even realizing it. The early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy and then Don Draper were our leaders, were very happy for nearly everyone, what with all the talk of Camelot and what-not, and so were the Reagan years, during which a lot of appealing “New Wave” music of which I was fond was recorded and performed. In the same way, I think we will all of us be much better off for having easy-on-the-eyes Sarah Palin in the White House, especially if one of her key advisors is able to convince her to ditch the glasses in favor of contact lenses. (Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.) I’m not denying for a minute that Mitt Romney is a major hunkboat too, but he’s a Mormon, and that makes me hardly less uncomfortable than our current president, with his unappealingly protuberant ears, being a Muslim.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether Sarah’s antipathy toward elitism is a good or bad thing. There are those who characterize her stance (I’m getting a little hot just typing that!) as demagogic, and anti-intellectual, but I’m not so sure anymore. I myself didn’t go to one of those expensive private East Coast universities like Harvard or Yale or Stanford, but at the western university I did attend, there were plenty of cretins — plenty of them, so maybe Sarah’s not so far off base after all when she encourages the average person not to allow themselves to be pushed around by someone with a Ph.D. from one of the ivy-covered universities I feel no compulsion to identify by name again so soon after doing so the first time.

It’s pretty obvious that in 2012 it’s likely to be Sara against Hilary; B. Hussein Obama, I think, is going to be good and sick by then of everybody hating on him, and will go back to wherever he really came from with his tail between his legs, and I’m speaking metaphorically, so let’s not have any accusations of racism, OK, especially in view of my having, uh, dated Alice R. Everhart just before Reagan was first elected president. When I start canvassing for Sarah on Monday, I will ask voters which candidate has in the past demonstrated greater verve and imagination — the one who named her daughter after a goddamned Joni Mitchell song, or the one who’s given her children awesome unusual names like Bristol, Sprig, Calculus, and D’Brickashaw.