Sara(h) Smiles Part 2: That Ludicrous Cow

I was so excited about my first day of canvassing for Sarah 2012 that I woke up a few minutes after four in the morning, and then couldn’t get back to sleep. I got up and took a shower, did some calisthenics, realized I should have done the calisthenics first, re-did them, showered again, and made myself some oatmeal, which is rich in fiber. It was still only six, so I took another shower and ironed my socks and underwear. I opened the door and breathed in the fragrance of a new American morning, one full of hopefulness and free of Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker of the House, and put on my Dockers and God Bless Our Troops T-shirt. I listened to a couple of my Toby Keith CDs, exchanged felicitations on Facebook with a couple of my fellow recent see-ers of the light, and headed for work in the Humvee I leased over the weekend in which to drive the two miles to work each day because its gets shameful gas mileage, and it’s our right as Americans to be wasteful of finite natural resources, and if we don’t exercise that right, we’re apt to lose it, and the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 pays for my gasoline. Drill, baby, drill!

Imagine my disappointment on arriving at CES2012 headquarters and immediately being informed that I needed to speak with Ruth L—, the self-described MGIC (mama grizzly in charge) (that’s what it says on her door!). In view of my background in the music business, she’d decided to have me spend the day on the phone.

My first calls were to secure the use of the Hall & Oates hit “Sara Smile” for use as the theme song of Our Gal’s candidacy. I discovered that the duo had broken up in 1989. The tall, blonde singer is now working in the plumbing supplies section at a Lowe’s in western Pennsylvania to try to reconnect with his working class roots, while the stumpy little porn-mustached guitar player, whose co-top billing I was never able to fathom, is now leading a Hall & Oates tribute act called Hollow Notes, on whose Website I was amused to note that someone had seen them at the Holiday Inn in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a couple of weeks ago and thought they were really good except for the guitar player, who “[didn’t] look nothing [sic] at all like the real guy.” And here he was the real guy, albeit 25 years after the fact!

He’s a bitter alcoholic these days, and hadn’t even heard of future president Palin, but was happy to release the rights to the song, and even to add an h to Sara, for $25,000 because the rights weren’t actually his. I talked him down to $300 and a case of Bud Lite, and moved on to my next calls, to a succession of rock personalities who in the past have endorsed Republican candidates or ideals. Sammy Hagar, who once sang so poignantly about his disinclination to kowtow to Big Government by observing the 55 miles per hour speed limit, and who once celebrated that Ronald Reagan “kicks ass,” said he’d be pleased to record a rockin’ new version of the Hall & Oates classic for our use. Ted Nugent eagerly agreed to overdub a guitar solo on it if Sammy were “into” the idea. Calls to the estate of the late Johnny Ramone weren’t returned.

Once having contacted the various rock stars, I next had to call the comedian and geographer Michael Palin at his home just outside London to see if I could persuade him to try to reunite Monty Python, except for the dead gay one, to do an international television special to benefit CES2012. No mincer of words, he said he’d sooner be chased naked through a field of chin-high nettles by rabid Rottweilers. I asked if he might in that case be persuaded to record just a series of Palin for Palin TV spots, but he would have none of that either. I didn't like his snooty tone, and asked where he imagined he’d be without the patronage of tens of millions of American nerds who’d adored Python back in the proverbial day, to the point of being able to recite whole sketches from memory in such a way as to make them seem utterly unfunny, and who now regarded Our Gal as totally hot. He said he couldn’t imagine any Python fan finding “that ludicrous cow” anything other than contemptible.

In the United Kingdom, it’s perfectly permissible to characterize a foolish woman as a cow, and even to use the f-word on television after the sprogs have pissed off to bed, but there are closed circuit television cameras nearly everywhere, and Obama-style socialism. I asked Palin, just out of curiosity, which university he had attended. He said Oxford, which sounded to me like the sort of place that turned out liberal elitists who think they know better than other people. “Well,” I said, “there’s your explanation,” and hung up, or, as they’d express it in the UK, put the phone down.