The Long Awaited William McNary

Just about the only group at Brown that I'm active in is Democracy Matters. I didn't see them at the activity fair, but I saw their name on the huge list of clubs and put a star next to them after reading their tagline. I sent an e-mail to their president, Jonathan Bogard, that said something very close to

Dear Jon,

I feel shut out, pissed off, and ready to change politics.
Also I am poor.

Sincerely,
Jeff Conway

I think he got back to me that night to tell me about the first meeting, at the Sarah Doyle Women's Center, at 8PM on Sunday. I rode my bike, and I saw Gene there, and a girl named Christine or Christina baked chocolate chip cookies that I thought were really good. I wore my "Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Republican" shirt that I had bought the day I came onto campus at the Urban Outfitters on Thayer St.

I can't remember exactly when we started planning, but at some point we wanted to bring in a speaker. I think this was probably the second or third meeting, and we went through a small list of names of people that supported public financing of election (which is what Democracy Matters [DM] works on). I think there was some big names, like Senator Dick Durbin, and some relative of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, and then William McNary, who Te-Ping said was the best and most electrifying speaker she had ever, ever seen. He seemed a lot more plausible than all the other candidates, plus Te-Ping swore by him, so we decided to go for him.

We wanted to make sure a lot of people came to see him and got excited for our cause, of course, so we started tableslipping. We decided to go the viral marketing route. The first batch of tableslips said in large letters "WHO IS WILLIAM MCNARY" and then had a blacked out face with a ? in the middle of it, signed Democracy Matters at the bottom.

After that, we decided to start "campusslipping," which is basically when you take the equivalent of a tableslip and tape it somewhere around campus where people will walk on it or see it. There are some really nice, reflective windows on the Bio-Med center building as you walk down Brown St., and people always look at themselves in them, so we were told to put some there. The slips said: "MCNARY // power is finite. // equality is infinite"

The next batch of tableslips, I believe, looked like a dictionary page and came to the entry "McNary," defined as one of the most electrifying speakers of our time, and then gave the location of the speech (Monday, November 11th, 8PM in Salomon 001). The next entry in the dictionary, I remember, was "williaw," which I think is a swift and cold breeze or something close to that. The writing on the dictionary pages got lighter as you went up or down, so the McNary entry was by far the darkest/most visible.

The final batch of tableslips was done on Monday, just to tell people that the speech was that night. I signed up to tableslip the V-Dub at 4PM, forgetting that I had my Education seminar at that time. I had to pass it off to Jon when I saw him setting up the table where we would hand out hot chocolate and talk to people about democracy.

I went to the speech. I had a bag of gummi worms in my pocket that I wanted to save until the show started but I ended up eating a couple of beforehand. Gene and Yana came to see, and they sat next to me. Danny and Kayla also came, and sat next to Gene and Yana. To be honest, I don't remember much about the speech, and I don't think it was that interesting. He wasn't as electrifying as he was made out to be. He basically outlined a socialist utopia and then said that public financing of elections would bring us that. He rubbed the podium he was speaking at very often, and didn't make good eye contact, and raised his back left foot up a lot. He had a LOT of papers in front of him and it looked like he was reading from them. He used a lot of rhymes. He's black, and he was bald, I think he was Baptist, but he was very liberal, although he did not mention abortion.

The most interesting part of the entire experience was the man sitting in front of me.

One time when I went to the Brown bookstore, I saw a homeless person when I was parking my bike beside the building. I think that was the first homeless person I had seen in Providence, although I can't be sure. I remember being startled by him, though. If I'm remembering correctly, this was the same man who was sitting in front of me at the McNary speech.

It was a black man, with male-pattern baldness, but that only covers about a third of his head. The rest of his hair is very long, and he seemed to have it in dreadlocks, but much thinner than usual dreadlocks. You could see spots and strands of gray in his hair, but largely it was black. He also had a substantial beard, and you could see gray in that, too. His skin seemed really leathery, and I could almost hear the texture at one point when he began rubbing his hands together repeatedly. I wondered why he did that. The top of his head - the bald part - also seemed pretty leathery.

He was wearing a large gold ring, and he took it off later. I remember he was wearing three layers of shirts, a jacket and some sort of athletic wear and something else. He clapped at the mention of universal health care, and at the criticism of the war in Iraq.

I had to wonder how he found out about the speech by McNary. It wasn't very well publicized in the community, from what I could tell, although one or two other adults did show up. This guy had a copy of the Brown Daily Herald in his hand - maybe it was in there, but I think I would have heard if somebody were putting something about McNary in there.

I wondered how long he'd been going to speeches like this at Brown. How many lectures has he been to? What does he know about public financing? What does he know about carbon trading or the ACLU or graph theory? What kind of education is this guy getting from these speeches?

Peace out.