Profile of an Ultra Conservative

We had to interview and write a profile about a person for my Nonfiction Writing class. I decided to give mine a twist ending.

Ward Davis, a lifelong Ithaca resident, prefers not to disclose exactly where he lives, for fear of further harassment from, as he calls them, the “liberal elite college types.”

            Davis explained as he took a drag off his cigarette, scowling, that college students and other liberals in Ithaca feel the need to steal the political signs he works so hard to purchase and place on his lawn.  “Sometimes I make them myself,” he added, explaining how he goes to Ace Hardware for poster board and glitter to make signs, because he feels the need to get the message out about certain issues, especially on his front lawn.

            Davis said he hasn’t spoken to anyone who looks at his signs, that he mostly just speaks “around” people, which consists largely of yelling from his lawn, especially if the signs are gone.  “But if half the people who steal them are stealing them because they agree so much, then that’s still pretty good.”

            Raised in a conservative Christian environment (at home, at least, where he says his parents talked about the “real issues” the schools wouldn’t talk about), Davis is strongly against gay marriage and other issues championed by liberals.  While talking about Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, he explained that he believes conservatives are taking back the country from “tax-and-spend” liberals like Barack Obama, who Davis claims want to legalize “gay abortions.”  I asked what else he felt the Tea Party movement was about, to which he answered “small government” and “tea.”

            Davis stressed that he is fine with gay people, as long as he doesn’t hear about it.  “Just keep it in your flooded basement,” he says (he suggested earlier in our conversation that rain and flooding could be brought on by atheism, but didn’t claim to know for sure). 

“Gay people can get married when they stop having gay sex.  I’m supposed to…[1]with them out there?”  

He decried what he thought he may have heard somewhere about gay sex being taught in school, saying it was a “perversion.”  “Teaching them how to have gay sex [in] fourth grade!”

            When I asked further about Davis’ views on homosexuality, he said he was against coddling “the gays,” who he claims are 1% of the population.  He said he has heard that the percentage is higher, but is pretty sure it’s “propaganda put out there by the elitist liberal media.”  He also says that the condition is curable.  “When your arm is broken, you go to the hospital and get it fixed.  Well, same thing when your brain is broken.”  Davis said he has never met a gay person.

            We delved into Davis’ upbringing, to see where his strong convictions came from.  Again, Davis’ parents instilled in him what they believed to be the “real issues” that the schools didn’t touch on.  God was a big one of those issues.  “God isn’t mentioned in school,” Davis says, and asserts that god is everywhere.  “God is present in math and spelling.  A lot of people probably don’t even know how to spell god.  Well, they probably can spell god.  But maybe not.”

            Davis’ parents taught him about the bible, in accordance with their Catholic faith.  The “best” religion, as Davis said.  His parents taught him that evolution is just a theory, and to follow the teachings of the bible, but only the New Testament.

            I asked Davis if he found Ithaca to be a liberal town in a governmental sense in addition to socially, and he said it depends on how you look at it.  “It’s still mostly white,” Davis said, not wishing to insinuate anything, just “putting it out there.”  He also criticized the local police for not responding adequately to the theft of his lawn signs.

            He did say the people of Ithaca can occasionally be “foolishly liberal.”  “A lot of young people think they know what they’re talking about, because they’re in school.  They haven’t lived in the real world yet, so they can be pretty closed-minded about things that way.”

            Regarding his real life experience, Davis talked about his job at a local gas station, which he was fired from “because of the recession.”  “They said it’s because I stole, but what evidence do they have of that?”  I inquired further about there being no evidence.  He said there was a video, but it “could have been my money I left in the cash register…before Obama was elected I was never fired for stealing from the gas station.”

            Davis touched briefly on his favorite news pundits, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, who he feels are being treated unfairly just for “Speaking the truth.”  He posed the question of whether Keith Olberman ever cries for his country.  I said Olberman does get very passionate on his show, whether or not Davis agrees with him, to which Davis replied that I could just go watch his show and live in “fantasy land” and “pray to Obama,” the “Black King.”  I asked if this had anything to do with Obama’s race.  He denied having said anything of the sort.  I reminded him that I was recording the conversation for my class, and he then accused me of being part of the college liberal elite.  He reiterated that I would learn about the real world when I got out of my “Ivory tower.”

            I asked if Davis had anything else to say about any other political issues.  He said he doesn’t keep up that much with current politics, watching only the occasional Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly.

            Ward Davis lives with his wife in Ithaca.  He is 26 years old.

            As you may have guessed at this point, reader, Ward Davis is not a real person, although there may be people with similar personalities to his, which is what makes this piece such a neat experiment.  He is a character created during my interview with fellow comedian and actor Ryan Merriam.  After interviewing Ryan as Davis, I talked to him about his acting experience and some of his personal background.

            We started by talking about the improvisation process.  Improvisation relies on both sides of the conversation, he tells me.  You must go into it with good questions in mind that will yield good/funny answers.  You have to “have a full character in your head” and “know what they would say.”  Exaggeration makes it funny.

            Though it’s fairly clear that Merriam does not agree with Ward Davis’ political and social views, I wanted to get some specific answers about his beliefs.  He said that he is very “middle of the road” politically, and that “both sides have their crazy people and their stupid people.

“Never underestimate how many stupid people there are. People on left are just as crazy in different ways.  It comes from ignorance, which is easy to play,” he said, regarding his portrayal of Davis.  “For every person against gay marriage, there’s also someone who thinks gay marriage should be mandatory so we can produce multi-ethnic half gay hybrids of humanity who will only drink the purest water.

            He thinks the real problem is that nobody listens to each other.  They panic and overcompensate. “It’s hard to get anything done when everyone’s screaming and panicking.  But it would also be a shame if there was no one to mock.  Like I said, I’m very middle of the road,” he said, at which we both laughed jovially.

Merriam has been acting since he was a kid, starting when he was in first or second grade, playing one of the lost boys in Peter Pan at The Hill Boarding School in Pottstown, where his family moved from Philadelphia when he was 6 months old because his father began teaching theater there (Merriam would later attend high school at Hill).  He said he had seen a lot of shows by that time, and loved the “whole experience” of theater; the creative elements, and getting to pretend and have people pay attention to it.

Non-creative aspects of school were never his strong suit or interest.  “I’ve never had a science class I didn’t almost fail.”  He said it was a combination of inaptitude and indifference – “I’m only ok at science, so I don’t like it, so I become worse at science.”
            Regarding Pottstown, he said it was “strange to be there,” his own family being “neither poor nor rich,” meanwhile, “one side of street was rich kids sent to boarding school, the other side people drinking malt liquor…I like to think of myself as both.”

With a major in drama focusing on playwriting and directing, and minors in both writing and English, Merriam plans to break more into live performance and eventually television, both with theater and with standup, his other passion.

His inspiration to do standup comes from years of watching professional comedians on TV with his dad, and going along on his father’s storytelling gigs.  Merriam said he enjoys acting because of the feeling of control, and that standup is the ultimate control, because the standup comic is writer, actor, and director all at once.

His standup is “influenced by older guys,” like Jim Gaffifan, Jerry Seinfeld (he grew up watching Seinfeld), and Marc Maron, who talks a lot about his life and “personal stuff,” which is more what Ryan does.  He says he listens to pretty much everything, from Larry the Cable Guy and Dane Cook to classics like George Carlin and Steve Martin. “Even if you don’t like the content, it’s interesting to listen to someone who’s really good at what they do.”

Merriam also has been a musician for some time, playing saxophone in his high school band.  He told me about his band teacher, Mr. Beard, who didn’t have a Beard.

We closed by talking about Merriam’s family, who he said is always very supportive of his goals.  “They’re only a little concerned” about what he says are his unrealistic goals.  “They’re just a little worried about how long they’re going to have to lend me money.”

[1] Davis literally said nothing between these two thoughts.