McCain Plans to Visit his Grade School Teachers

After watching American Idol finalist David Cook pay a warm and loving visit to his former elementary school music teacher on the hit Fox TV show last night, John McCain decided to visit his own grade school teachers.

Riding in his campaign bus through his hometown in Northern Virginia, the erstwhile schoolboy stared out his window at an overgrown field of weeds, piles of abandoned 1930s automobiles, and a broken slab of concrete that was once the “Robert E. Lee Grade School,” and waxed nostalgic. “My grammar teacher, Miss Taylor, would smack me hard on the knuckles with a ruler for writing with my left hand,” he said. “Years later, my captors in Viet Nam had a similar torture, ramming various parts of my body into brick walls to get me to talk. All I could say was ‘Fuck you, Miss Taylor! Fuck you, Miss Taylor!’ — but they never got another word out of me.”

He said he couldn’t wait to sit down with Miss Taylor and tell her how inflicting him with pain at an early age kept him alive and prevented him from passing top government secrets to the enemy. Or tell his math teacher, Miss Jones, how failing him in arithmetic has helped him forge his economic policies. “My lack of comprehension of long division has been an asset my whole career.”

McCain admitted it won’t be easy tracking down the educators. “If my memory serves me, they were all unmarried women in their fifties and sixties,” he said. “That would make most of them between a hundred-and-ten and a hundred-and-thirty years old. They could be living in a different city or teaching in a different school district, for all we know.”

Crediting his teachers for all the successes he’s had in his life, McCain lamented, “I hope they remember me.”


Braddon Mendelson