Strollerderby

I’m fairly certain the story I’m about to relate happened when I was in 6th grade, an age at which I was old enough to appreciate what was happening, but now sufficiently eroded away in my memory to preclude a perfect recall of the event.

The assignment was a grade school perennial: Write to our local Congressperson or Senator. If he wrote back? Extra credit. So I took my #2 pencil in my chubby fingers and applied it with an unmistakably adolescent scrawl to a sheet of wide-ruled, three-hole punched notebook paper.

“Dear Senator McCain,” I began; I probably picked McCain because he had recently been “promoted” from the House to the Senate, and his name was in the news. I wasn’t – at 11 or 12 – what you could call “politically engaged.” I don’t think I knew what the ideological differences between the parties were. I mean, to be honest, I didn’t know much of anything. I just wanted to finish my homework before Spenser: For Hire started.

So I filled the rest of the two “body” paragraphs of the letter with whatever semi-coherent content my preteen mind could generate. I don’t remember the line by line specifics, but a few words and phrases stand out in my memory from the time – words and phrases I was particularly pleased with being able to use at the time, as I was fairly certain they made me sound more grown-up and politically aware than I actually was at the time:

    “Constituencies”

    “Partisan gridlock”

    “Reach across the aisle”

String these three items together and you get the picture:  I exhorted him (although I didn’t know that word at the time) to “reach across the aisle” and fight against “partisan gridlock” on behalf of his “constituencies” at home in the great state of Arizona.

As I said: No great indication of a developing political mind— but what could one honestly expect from someone who was saving up his allowance to buy Serpentor?

I mailed my letter and all but forgot about it.

Several weeks later, during dinner, the phone rang. I remember that I answered the call. I don’t remember the name of the youngish-sounding guy on the other end of the phone (in the tall-tale version of this story it would be Mark Salter), but I remember where he worked.

“This is ___ from Senator McCain’s office. Can I talk to Jeffrey, please?

“This is he.”

What follows is, as best as I can reconstruct from my memory, the remainder of the call in its entirety. Once he started speaking, I didn’t say a word.

“Well, Jeffrey, I received your letter to Senator McCain, and I wanted to respond to you. First of all, the Senator has one constituency, the residents of the State of Arizona—not multiple constituencies, as you wrote.”

“Also, since the Senator just arrived in the Senate, he has not been a part of the problem of “partisan gridlock” you write about. What’s more, if you had done your research, you would see that while he was in the House of Representatives, Senator McCain made it a point to “reach across the aisle” on multiple occasions, just as your letter would have him do.”

“I can tell you’re a kid and everything, but if you ever want to be taken seriously you should you get your facts straight, especially before you write a letter like this.”

I think I said, “Okay, thanks,” before he hung up on me. That was it.

“What the hell was that?” I thought to myself.

Whatever my expectations had been for that assignment, one thing I didn’t expect was to be taken to task for my (admittedly middling) effort at engaging with my government. I remember feeling as though I had just been kicked in the gut, or had my pants pulled down by a bully from an older class — neither of which were entirely foreign experiences to me at the time.

I also recall being astonished at the fact that whoever this guy was, he apparently had nothing better to do than call up a grade-schooler during dinner and yell at him. As the schoolyard saying went at the time, I wondered “Who had piddled on his Post Toasties that morning?”

Now, I’m not defending my letter. Clearly, I hadn’t done the homework to do my homework. But it’s not like there was an Internet to research anyone’s congressional voting record back then, and the assignment simply wasn’t worth enough, points-wise, to justify coercing my Mom into taking me to the library (which she would have done).

The perturbed call from McCain’s office actually did teach me a valuable lesson in “not talking out of my butt.” However, I’m certain I could have learned that same lesson, given the same set of circumstances, without the meanness. Since then, I’ve dealt with kids in a variety of capacities (student teacher, camp counselor, etc.) and I can say that, no matter how dumb they act, you’re never supposed to treat them like they’re stupid.

Mainly, I recall this experience as one of those childhood moments—certainly not my proudest—that sticks around in your memory because, even if you’re just a stupid kid, you can see right through a so-called grown-up’s behavior:

At that moment, I knew that he handled the call poorly.

I marveled at the fact that I had been yelled at for using a word (”constituencies”) that I knew I had used properly. I mean, conceivably, weren’t kids one constituency and adults another? Men one, women another? Goldwater Republicans and Udall Democrats? Constituencies.

But mostly, I wondered what sort of jerk Senator McCain must have been to inspire his staff to achieve such levels of jerkiness?

Twenty-something years later, Senator McCain’s conduct during his presidential campaign has provided me with the answer to that question: Whether he’s furiously taking exception with the assertions of mendacity by the Des Moines Register or referring to his distinguished colleague from the Senate and opponent in his race for the nation’s highest office as “That one,” one thing is clear about Senator McCain.

He’s exactly the sort of guy who would tell one of his minions to rough up a naive 12-year-old constituent by phone.

In short, not much has changed since then… Except the shows on Prime time.

In related news, Obama smells like rainbows and unicorns.

More by this author:

10 WORST. BABY. PRODUCTS. EVER! (Part 1)

Cute Overload: White Tiger Kitten and Monkey are Friends (PICS!)