Sara(h) Smiles, Part 21: Rowe, Rowe, Rowe Your Boat

Naturally, I was only being mischievous, in that endearing way I have, when I suggested the other day that Donald Trump ought to be Sarah’s running mate in 2012. I can’t imagine one as vainglorious as he willingly playing second fiddle to a woman, not even one as hot as Sarah. But I’ve had another idea, and this isn’t a kidding-around one: Mike Rowe, from the Wrangler and Ford commercials — and from the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, which I’ve never watched because I’m squeamish.

Nearly everything about him is perfect. Start with his name — two virile, no-nonsense, all-American monosyllables, in the tradition of George Bush, but better, since “George” is a fairly…squishy sound, whereas Mike is as hard as a Louisville slugger. Mike’s a fearsome heavyweight champion’s (Tyson’s) name, or a hard-boiled detective’s (Hammer’s), or a tough-as-nails former Chicago Bears coach (Ditka’s). George is a curious monkey’s name, or a homosexual crooner’s (Boy).

Rowe is everything his name promises, as far — in his Wrangler jeans, facial crags, and baseball cap — as it’s possible to be from an elitist liberal who thinks he knows more than the average American just because he has a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university. He was an Eagle Scout, and has big pectoral muscles, but everything about him mumbles, “Aw, shucks.” He’s somebody the average American working man could easily picture hoisting a couple of cold brewskis with, and the gals already think of him as having a cute butt — an asset too few vice presidential candidates have offered in recent elections — because of the Wrangler commercials. Whether he actually has one is entirely immaterial, in the same way that Burt Reynolds’ having an undersized penis became immaterial after Cosmopolitan presented him to its readership as a sexpot.

I won’t say Rowe’s perfect; the skeletons in his closet include having sung with the Baltimore Opera at one point, and his living nowadays in San Francisco, that cesspool of homosexuality and Pelosi-ism. What I’m hoping is that his having lived there and remained straight (please, Lord, let it be so!) will make him even more attractive to common-sense conservatives, especially if he can be persuaded to manifest a little revulsion at his LGBT neighbors, Stacy and Kim.

(Speaking of the Chicago Bears, I have formulated a theory as to why commentators and coaches so love to say football — why, for instance, they’ll invariably say, “They’re a heck of a football team,” or, “He’s a talented football player, or, “If we can stop their running attack, we think we can win the football game” even though it’s redundant in each case; everyone knows full well that a guy predicting the winner of the Saints vs. Steelers game isn’t talking about lacrosse or synchronized swimming.

The reason you don’t hear comparable self-references in the other major team sports, basketball or baseball, is that football is just such fun to say, its first syllable being close to the sound boys make when trying to evoke the sound of an arrow or throwing star flying through the air and then hitting its target. And at the end of that first syllable, your mouth is poised perfectly to add ball, as it is with neither of the other two sports.)

In other news, Sarah has tweeted (God is that cute, or what? How could she be more adorable?) that Julian Assange, Mr. WikiLeaks, ought to be hunted down like a dog, a moose, or one of those wolves she, as governor of Alaska, had sharpshooters picking off from helicopters. Naturally, the lamestream media have been having a field day wondering where she comes off endorsing the de facto assassination of a foreign national. My only quibble — and I think this may have to do with the fact that Twitter tweets can comprise only a limited number of characters — is that she didn’t urge the assassins to save a bullet or two for that rhymes-with-witch Katie Couric, Jon Stewart, Michael Moore, or Bill Maher. Might as well take 'em all down at once, it seems to me.

Kill, baby, kill!

Reviewing My Suitability

I radically altered my opinion of Donald Trump on hearing that, if he wins the Republican nomination for president in 2012, he will ask Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the celebrated White House party crashers, to be his co-running mates. Then Beth Orton materialized, smaller than I’d expected, and far deeper into middle age, and brassy in the way of people who are trying to hide vulnerability. I asked if she might enjoy singing her sublimely languid “The Sweetest Decline,” which is on my iPod, and which has been a favorite of mine from the first time I heard it. She began immediately to sing, but angrily, not at all as on the record. I was having a devil of a time accompanying her, as paper serviettes were held loosely around the fretboard of my guitar by rubber bands. Then I woke from my dream and came in here, the study, and learned that I had been passed over for the design job in Manhattan for which I was interviewed last Friday, in spite of having devoted last weekend to working up a lot of stuff intended to demonstrate that I wasn’t only the best designer they’d seen, but also the one most eager to work with them.

Their email read as follows:

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to review your suitability for our recently advertised design position. We regret to advise that we have chosen a candidate whose skill set more closely conformed to our expectations.

BTW, did you honestly imagine that we would consider offering the job to someone your age? Oh, that would have been smart, wouldn’t it? We give you the job, and get an important new client, and halfway through your work for them, you get prostate cancer, or dementia, or some other geriatric infirmity, and we’re left holding the bag. Or maybe, because you quit smoking before most of us here were even born, and eat reasonably well — though you’ve been pretty lax about the five servings of fresh fruit and vegetables per day — and work out daily, you won’t get prostate cancer or dementia, but just lose continence, and won’t the smell of your adult diapers be a treat for the rest of us here in the confined space we share. Or maybe you’ll have the presence of mind to change them frequently, in which case you’ll be distracted from your work, and someone else will have to pick up the slack, and the festering resentment around here will be even worse than the stench would have been.

Honestly, don’t you think it’s time, instead of coming in for job interviews, that you went gentle into that good night, or at least checked yourself into one of those mesmerizingly beige assisted living centers, the magazine advertisements for which invariably show fantastically attractive over-60s in polo shirts playing golf and tennis and grinning at each other at cookouts with their perfect straight teeth? (You probably imagined that you’d be that sort of person yourself — one who looked at 60 pretty much exactly as he had at 35, but with thick white hair, rather than thick black. But it didn’t work out so well, did it, old-timer?)

As for your…creative, maybe it looked really slick to the rubes in south central Wisconsin (though we notice you weren’t able to get a job there either), but you’re — or at least we’re — in the Big Apple now, sunshine, and drop shadows and layer masks don’t thrill us so much. And what’s with the relentless retro? Ninety-eight percent of your stuff looks exactly the same. And the copy! You’re trying to sell to average, harried people here, sunshine, and not college sophomores. Maybe you should save your wordplays and self-described “sparkling wit” for your blog, at which we had a long enough look to get really tired of trying to plow through sentences that seem never to end. We notice it’s attracted a whopping 18 subscribers in the 11 months you’ve been writing it; does that not tell you a little something?

Again, we thank you for interviewing with us, and wish you the best of luck in the future.