The rally, my first and last (and I’m not pulling a Cher, here, either–this really is my farewell tour, folks), was an experience. It was actually much like I had feared it would be, but I have to say finally meeting Dani B. in the flesh was not at all dreadful. He’s a delightful lad, in his woolly way, so far as I can tell. There were other delightful folks I’m glad to have met (including Jen, who took the pictures below), and for me that was always the point. My Doctor says I should get out and mix more. “People,” he’s always saying, “not gin and Prozac.”

Now I plan to spend some time in seclusion, of course. Like Candide, at the end of Rally Road, I find I have come full circle. My inner Pangloss intones: “There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.” “Excellently observed,” my Inner Candide answers; “but let us cultivate our garden.”

All I can say is I’m glad I didn’t spend more than about fifteen bucks on the thing. I had three poster-size copies made—reading, simply “Keep MBTA Fares fair” and bought some new underwear for the occasion (I needed some new boxers anyway), but that’s about it. Lee Matsueda of the T Riders Union provided amplification, and TRU brought signs of their own.

Shoogs met me around three on the Square, but we didn’t really have much to do until four. The first people to show up, around fifteen minutes before the rally was to begin, were these punk-socialists. Of course they weren’t serious socialists—they just chose the most hopeless political cause they could find and joined it. They’re more like impotent designer anarchists in the final analysis. Amateur provocateurs out to draw attention to no greater a cause than the rebels without one.

I can’t deny it pissed me off to see these protest parasites show up and actually outnumber the poor, beleaguered protesters themselves. Not that they weren’t protesting. Christ, their entire existence is a protest. But there are ways things are done—and I’m just talking about people things here. Common courtesy. You want to be pariahs, do it on your own time. Get your own damn permit, don’t glom onto mine.

I mean, seriously, people. Have some manners. Do you realize how many of our social ills could be solved–just like that–with simple manners? These guys were my age, and acting like the trenchcoat mafia. When I told them to stop scaring off potential protesters one of them (I’m not sure if it was Mo or Curly — Larry was hanging back at this point)–but one of them even sneered and said: “we can do whatever we want, it’s a public square!” I was like, right, whatever. How many times have I heard that one (in the form of “it’s a free country!” and “you’re not the boss of me!”) from my nine and ten year old nieces?

It was like a bad after-school special, where the square student council president confronts the rebel outcasts trying to crash the big homecoming dance. I felt humorless and absurd doing it, and realized immediately that they’d be perfectly happy to argue with me unto the apocalypse. I told them, look, just try to stay out from in front of the cameras, will you? And by the way, this is no way to get laid.

The protest rally parasite problem is one I have to admit I had not anticipated in the least. You want to come to a rally someone’s organized because you dig what they’re trying to do, why not contact them first? I mean, if you’re socialists that shouldn’t be that big a deal. Socialize a little. There were several groups represented, but everyone had the courtesy to call first and discuss their ideas and goals. These guys basically showed up in an ugly, pestilent lump, didn’t say anything to us, and just started accosting people right and left in front of us. They were chasing people down like kids chasing pigeons in the park. People were scrambling to get away from them.

But once the rally (such as it was) started, they drifted to the margins and disappeared, as is their wont.

I wish I could say the same of the Deval Patrick groupies. They were as disgusting in their way as the impotent designer socialists. A bunch of Barbie and Ken dolls with super-sized campaign signs who just showed up in a clump and didn’t mix with the rabble, either. In their favor, there was an adult representative from his campaign who found me and introduced herself, and asked if I minded their being there and if I wouldn’t mind also mentioning that Deval would have been there himself if he had not had a prior engagement.

She went on her merry way and left the kids to find the spot where they were most likely to get their super-size signs on TV. You can see them schlubbed-up behind Lee Matsueda in the last picture below. They were utterly disengaged, uncommunicative, and looked dreadfully bored throughout the proceedings.

You know, I would not have been so touchy about all these parasites if the beast itself they were feeding off of wasn’t so pitiful. I mean they easily outnumbered real, live protesters. It was like a twelve-mile long tapeworm feeding off a teacup chihuahua. And in the end none of the networks (NECN, CBS4, and WHDH-7 were all there), to my knowledge, used any footage from the rally.

In fact, there was hardly anything about the hearing, much less the rally, in the papers. Nothing in Metro (and this was a Metro-worthy rally if ever there was one), a tiny blurb about Deval Patrick’s cursory appearance at the hearing in the Glob, and a brief mention in the Herald, who put the number in attendance at the rally at one hundred.

That much-disputed number. In a few years’ time I guarantee you it will be in the thousands. It’s the Woodstock effect. People will be like, it was a conspiracy! A media black-out! And when you ask someone—just some random someone at some dinner party or at a pick-up bar–if they were there, they’ll be all like, hell, yeah. And you’ll be all like, well, I didn’t see you there. And they’ll be like, Well there were about fifty-thousand of us. They had all the streets all blocked off.

And then you’ll reminisce together about how those crazy socialists blew up an MBTA bus while Deval Patrick introduced Nelson Mandela to the ecstatic applaud of the revolutionary masses. And then how it was all wiped from the record because Dan Grabauskas ordered the Herald to report that only a hundred people were there. And no further mention was ever made, spirits were crushed, the MBTA Liberation Army was driven underground, and finally fled to the hills of New Hampshire to fight their guerrilla war, now in its twenty-fifth year.

And you’ll be like, it sucks we’re paying twelve-hundred- seventy-three bucks a month for a T pass, but I guess if that’s what the MBTA says it needs to get through fiscal 2031, what can you do?

Just between you and me, I’d put the real number at something more like 33, 34, maybe 40, if you count passersby who paused momentarily to take in the sad spectacle and rubberneckers in their passing cars on Dartmouth. And about 25 of the aforementioned were IDAs, Devalheads, or the media. Then there were three of my friends, and Dani B., like I said there would be, and I think three other kind souls I was very grateful took the time to come out and was very pleased to have met.

I’ll have more to say about the hearing when I get a chance to go over the audio recording I made of it. The quality of the recording is pretty bad, but I can just about make out most of it. I should have some juicy tidbits for you tomorrow.

Until then, here are some pics from the big-ass rally of ‘06. That’s me, at top, imploring an uncaring universe not to ignore the two-page list of demands I’ve just outlined, and introducing Senator Jarrett Barrios, who’s in the next shot. Then there’s one of the “crowd,” such as it was (two of my three friends, a cameraman, a couple of TRU guys, and some poor sucker from NECN who’s thinking, “what the fuck?”). And finally, that’s Lee Matsueda (rocking that mic) and a couple of those Devalhead slugsacks. (They couldn’t even stand up–the one on the left has his fat ass planted right on Kahlil Gibran’s mug. Talk about manners.)