Sanity is more reasonable than fear
7:15 a.m. Wake up, feel refreshed, ready to restore sanity and/or fear to our once-great nation.
7:20 a.m. Begin morning routine. Shower, stretch, meditate. In honor of the day, decide to only mutter at portrait of George W. Bush instead of yell. Only throw three darts at Sarah Palin poster. Am already feeling more reasonable.
7:45 a.m. Have breakfast of muesli and organic yogurt. Wonder if other people would be less angry if they ate healthier. Probably not. Did not work for me during Bush era.
8:15 a.m. Pack up my hemp NPR tote bag, ready to go. Have time to ponder rally while waiting to leave.
Is it a rally for moderates? Is it to protest extremism in our political discourse? Is it about liberal exasperation? Anti-insanity? Anti-fear? Or is it a parody of rallies? The anti-rally rally?
Sure, why not. The rally is a Rorschach blot. It is all things to all people. All shall bow down and cower before the power that is the rally. Or the anti-rally rally. Or whatever it is.
The truth is, I am going because I love Jon Stewart. He has an uncanny ability to combine political advocacy, satire and respect in a way that should be impossible, but is dang near perfect. If he is holding a rally, then I want to go. Whatever it is.
9:30 a.m. Arrive at Metro station, a few stops in from end of the line. Train comes within a minute, but is already packed with reasonable non-extremists. We momentarily give in to passion and push our way on. I realize then what is unreasonable: flying half-way across the country, crashing at a friend's brother-in-law's basement, jamming myself into a metro car and joining hundreds of thousands of other people in a rally that politely requests everyone to calm down and be reasonable.
The Metro is tight. I have not felt this enclosed since being in the womb. But the womb did not smell like this guy's armpit.
Also, we are holding on with clenched fists to the top of a speeding train. I'm certain this is a good metaphor for something or other.
One person shouts: "Who's going to the rally!"
Everyone says loudly, without quite shouting: "Yeah!"
Somebody: "That was very reasonable enthusiasm."
10:00 a.m. Metro dumps us out at Chinatown. Liberals and moderates are not afraid of the Chinese.
10:05 a.m. Hundreds of liberals have already flocked to Starbucks for their lattes. Good thing it wasn't a Whole Foods, or violence may have ensued. I realize at this point that crowd is mostly liberals after all.
10:30 a.m. Arrive at National Mall. I am comforted by the sight of all the Porta-Potties. They tried to scare us before the rally by saying there wouldn't be enough bathroom facilities. As if that would scare liberals away from anything.
10:45 a.m. Find some space three Jumbotrons back from the stage, between the Air & Space Museum and the Art Museum, what we feel is the most moderate spot on the mall. Start taking photos. First sign I see is: "It's OK to disagree. But use your indoor voice." Score one for moderation in discourse. Another: "I am moderately excited by this." Score one for parody.
10:55 a.m. Weather is absolutely perfect. Partly sunny, in the 60s. God approves of this rally, whatever it is.
The Jumbotrons are replaying hilarious clips from Daily Show and Colbert Report about the rally itself, some sort of meta-rally-mind-blow thing. Everyone is grooving. Especially those guys upwind with the funky cigarettes, hoping that the states' right folks are serious about freedom.
11:00 a.m. In between clips, they play other clips of Coldplay, Devo, Vampire Weekend, Green Day, plus an advertisement for DonorsChoose.org. Michelle Obama introduces it on screen and gets biggest cheer so far. As she should. That woman is a goddess. Oops. Must get moderation back in check. She is just a fine woman.
11:45 a.m. Cell coverage goes down. Network completely swamped, making us unable to connect with friends that were going to join us. God apparently not OK with twittering or facebook updates during the rally. Maybe God doesn't like my friends, thinks they are a bad influence on me. Maybe God thinks I'm the bad influence. Always hard to know what God is thinking.
12:00 noon The Roots take the stage with John Legend, play some funky music for us white boys. We try to groove, as best we can. The crowd is largely white, perhaps similar to the population at large, but certainly a Daily Show and Colbert Report demographic. Or maybe that's just the people who arrived when we did, neither too early nor too late, at a reasonable time to get a reasonable spot to see things at a reasonable distance. The Roots play for a half hour. Old people get tired and sit down.
The crowd is huge by now, stretching as far as we can see in both directions. You don't get a perspective of the size when you are in it. But, as I've said before, you have to show up to these things if you hope to be accurately undercounted.
12:35ish p.m. Myth Buster guys come on stage, play various games with us, like seeing how long it takes a stadium wave to travel through the crowd (something like a minute?). We discover we are in the front half of the crowd. Or the back half are a bunch of laggards. Which they are, since they were late. Myth Buster guys get us to all jump up and down to create an earthquake. We succeed in creating one 1/14 billionth the size of the San Francisco earthquake. Then we create one a 100 times bigger than a car crash at 35 mph. Hurray for us. But now we are impatient. Let's get Stewart and Colbert out here already.
1:00 p.m. Finally, Jon comes out. Does the national anthem. It starts out so schmaltzy that I wonder if it is a joke. But they kick it before the end. Nice save.
1:10ish p.m. Father Guido comes out and gives the benediction, asking God for a sign on which is the right religion. As usual, he is humorish, without quite being humorous.
1:15ish p.m. Colbert comes out from his bunker in a red, white and blue superhero suit and the real show begins. I stop checking the time. It's an hour and a half of humor sketches that you can already find on YouTube. Some of them are hilarious, like Wyatt Cenac and Jason Jones doing opposing media points of view on the rally by interviewing the same guy. Others don't work very well, like the counting of the audience, which seems like a great idea, but got old very quickly. Some of the sketches have a cornball, Disneyland-esque feel. Comedy in front of such a large audience has to be very hard.
It is mostly rally parody stuff, until they bring out Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens. People audibly gasp around me. More than one person starts to tear up. A former beloved songwriter turned former conservative Muslim turned reasonable Muslim performing his own Peace Train is by far the most poignant moment of the rally.
Unfortunately, the moment is ruined when Colbert interrupts and says he won't board the peace train. Liberals stumble out of their weepy trances, start to raise their voices in anger, look for nearby pitchforks and rocks to hurl at the stage. Rocks are dropped when they realize it is just part of a comedy bit, as Ozzy Osbourne comes on to perform Crazy Train, followed by the O'Jays with Love Train. Still, the moment could have been truly special. Although the comedy bit turns out to be funny too.
Awards for reasonableness and fear are awarded. The reasonable awards are well-chosen. They go to guy who pitched a perfect game that was nullified by a bad ump call but who then forgave the ump, the professional wrestler Mick Foley, and some guy who stole a Koran from someone who was going to burn it.
The fear awards were given to Mark Zuckerberg, Anderson Cooper's shirt, and a seven year old girl, who they said were braver for showing up than the news organizations who banned their reporters from coming to the rally. Sure, these were somewhat funny, but it's a bit lame too. There's no question that Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and a host of others are way higher on the list of people who create fear in the world. But, I guess they were trying to prove they were being non-partisan, by picking on Anderson Cooper. Bah. Humbug. Lame.
As the rally progresses, it becomes obvious that it is focusing more on the fear vs reason theme than anything else. Jon and Stephen have a debate about whether fear is stronger than reason, and Jon wins, but not until the last fifteen minutes. Then Jon comes through with a serious speech, and hits a home run. The rally is about anti-fear. The media creates and inflames fear. The media is supposed to be our political immune system. But if it over-reacts, it ends up doing more harm than good. People are for the most part reasonable. Stop calling each other names. Stop the guilt by association. Be reasonable. We live in tough times. Not end times.
I later go to where I usually go for the most incisive and reasonable thoughts on any given topic: Comments in a blog post. A seasoned old guy from Utah says that he's been to a lot of political rallies and that this was the only truly peace rally he has ever been to. And it's true. Jon is begging us for peace, in our politics, in our religions, and in our discourse.
Dang. He's speaking to me. I hate that. I'm always quick to pounce on those who confuse all Muslims with some terrorists. So why, then, am I so quick to jump from Glenn Beck and Fox News to "conservatives"? I need to do better. After all, core conservative ideas can be reasonable. Government should be as small as necessary to accomplish collectively what we cannot accomplish individually.
And yet, I'm conflicted. What do I do with the unreasonableness? What happens when that core idea gets translated into "government health care is like genocide"? That government is evil? I can simply laugh it off, which is what the Daily Show is all about. And it does help. It especially helps when I am surrounded by 200,000+ other people who are also laughing along.
But that's not enough. When ideas are unreasonable and elected officials act on them, it becomes t
ragedy. Like the idea that we can do whatever we want because we are the most powerful country in the world. That idea leads to unnecessary war, hundreds of thousands of dead, millions of people suffering, and hundreds of millions of dollars wasted. We need to keep the crazy out of government policy.
Oh, that's right. Today is Election Day. I wonder if there is still time.
3:00 p.m. Rally ends. We wander around the mall, snap more photos of the funny signs.
4:00 p.m. I personally witness Darth Vader and Napoleon Dynamite bury the axe on their longtime feud. They agree never again to use dance or The Force in inappropriate ways. World rejoices. Rally an unmitigated success.
16 comments
Ann Marie Schreiber
Dan the Man: You rock, thanks for your insight, passion and pithy writing. Instead of dancing to ‘Peace Train”, I think we’d all be less hateful doing the ‘Snoopy Dance’. Everybody loves Charlie Brown.
Dan, great recap. I was there as well, but was one of the laggards you mention. This allowed me to get some sense of the crowd, however, and it was huge. When we arrived close to noon, we ended up in a sea of people (outside the event but near its initial entrance). It took much time but we were able to negotiate our way to a less congested area further away from the rally just so we could head away from the stage and find an entrance point to the mall. By noon, the cops had already blocked off many of the through streets. At one point, I looked to my right and saw at least 5 city blocks crammed full of people—all coming toward the mall. I would wager there were more than 200K in attendance.
As we walked around and attempted to find a place where we could a) view a screen and b) hear something from the PA—we eventually found that place—we missed a lot of the early action you described. And of course I was too stupid to remember to record the TV broadcast. Anyway, what I enjoyed, more than anything, was that this large crowd had a sense of humor. It’s one thing to be in a place with 200K+ politically savvy folks who care about their country; it’s another thing to be in a place with 200K+ politically savvy folks who care about their country AND have a sense of humor. I think the signs stole the show. I especially enjoyed the dry humor of one sign: photo of Barack with a caption that read “Not Hitler”; photo of Glenn Beck underneath with a caption that read “Not Hitler”; photo of Hitler at the bottom with a caption that read “Hitler!” Second place goes to a sign that simply read: “[citation needed]”.
Also, I liked the “Train” medley and I give bonus points for getting Kareem and a WWF wrestler worked into the proceedings.
Robert Knilands
I find the context of Jon Stewart and his followers amusing. He says he doesn’t want partisan politics, but he is clearly partisan. Then he says that shouldn’t matter, either, because his show is satire, and it’s on Comedy Central, not CNN, blahblahblah.
It’s not much different from the Tea Party people who have participated in the left vs. right nonsense but who now claim they want “something different.”
Luke
Robert Knilands: You’re not getting it.
Take a step back and look at how crazy the wingnuts are, and also realize that they’re a small but vocal minority. The wingnuts on the Right have been getting a lot of press lately. There are crazy wingnuts on the Left too. Next, realize that Fox News is a partisan propaganda machine. Once you realize all of that AND take a step back to look at the big picture, Stewart’s attitude makes a *lot* of sense.
By refusing to tolerate bullshit, Stewart manages represent my views *much* better than anyone who campaigned in today’s election.
Chris
Robert-
You seem like an independant thinker.
I read this and was hoping nobody would “challenge” anything in this article. Its best to just let it be.
“I pack up my hemp NPR tote bag….”
C’mon, it is what it is…
Chris Hedges, author of What Every Person Should Know About War (2003) & Empire of Illusion (2009) shares some thoughts on the rally here:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_phantom_left_20101031/
...lately he argues that we are becoming a post-literate society obsessed with the spectacular. As such, we are pretty okay with blowing people up as a foreign policy (even if it bankrupts us). He’s not all that bad…he even gave a shout out to Lysistrata in last week’s column.
oops. Link fixed here.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_phantom_left_20101031/
...or not. If this doesn’t work, I’m calling out to the SP Gods for help.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_phantom_left_20101031/
Robert Knilands
What a shock: The first response is “You don’t get it.” Who could have seen that coming?
Stewart did a good thing by bringing about the demise of “Crossfire.” Of course, he was years late in accomplishing that, but we take what we can get.
Other than that, we could go back and forth about this for eons, and you will keep making the same response (also anonymously, which I think I have made my point about, too.)
My point remains the same: Stewart plays a shell game where he claims to be credible, except when he isn’t because, after all, it’s just satire on a comedy channel. And he isn’t really partisan, except when he is, which is a lot of the time.
He has a lot of minions who fall for this crap. I’d venture to say THEY are the ones who don’t get it. But again, we could go back and forth on this, and no one would see the other side.
The result, though, is Stewart will still be partisan and still be playing the same game, as long as people allow him to do so. The minions who back him are the same irritating Internet victory lap runners who never really have won anything. Aside from the merciful end of Crossfire, what is really being supported or accomplished here? Very little.
I don’t know that partisanship or non-partisanship is Stewart’s goal one way or the other. He’s the court jester. He speaks truth as he sees it through jokes. His targets are generally 1) hypocrites 2) those who put ideology above reason or facts and 3) the vapid and/or fear-mongering media. That a large majority of that happens to be elected Republicans and Fox news isn’t partisanship so much as reality.
So what was the rally about? It was a plea for reasoned debate on substantive issues via nonsensical signs. It was a hope that not everyone in the country has gone insane. Maybe it was just one big piece of performance art. But I don’t think anyone who went really thought it would change anything. Maybe it’s just what frustrated people do when our political system breaks and there is no obvious way for ordinary people like us to fix it.
For me, it was a reminder not to demonize people I disagree with. So, if nothing else, that’s a good thing to be reminded of.
Robert Knilands
Except Jon Stewart demonizes people he disagrees with.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
And he can claim he’s criticizing those things you mentioned, but when so much of it is aimed at one side, there’s a word to describe it. I’m trying to think of the word ... oh, yeah—partisan.
stuart tarr
What’s wrong with partisan? U.S. democracy was certainly more vibrant, with twice the current turn-out when we had a partisan press in the 19th century.
I guess one person’s “criticism” can be another person’s “demonization”. I do know that Stewart treats his guests with great respect and tries to have substantive discussions with them over areas where they disagree. That’s pretty rare these days.
Robert Knilands
There would be nothing wrong with partisan if people were (1) owning it; (2) presenting sensible ideas; (3) pursuing the best ideas and putting partisanship aside.
I guess I have missed these Algonquin Round Table sessions where Jon Stewart led these fabulous, substantive debates. The interviews I’ve seen have been either him lobbing softballs for people he agrees with, or something like the discussion with Obama, where Stewart poked fun and also got slammed pretty hard at one point.
And the discussion with the Crossfire guys was basically him telling them how much they sucked, and it sounds as if he kept doing that for an hour after the show. He did get his point across and accomplish something there, but wasn’t that four years ago? How long are the victory lap runners going to celebrate that event?
Let me know what great policies Stewart has proposed. I will predict that the list will either be very short, or it will be very similar to one political party’s goals. That would make it—what’s that word again? Oh, yeah—partisan.
I think we are talking past one another Robert. The issue isn’t whether Stewart is partisan (yes, he is, but I don’t think anyone is arguing against that). What he is asking is that people be reasonable to each other, to not let ideology trump reason or facts, to not demonize each other. I don’t think he does any of those things. Maybe you do, but that’s a different issue than whether he is partisan, which to me just means he takes a consistent side.
Robert Knilands
“What he is asking is that people be reasonable to each other, to not let ideology trump reason or facts, to not demonize each other. I don’t think he does any of those things.”
I’m starting to wonder if we’re talking about the same person or the same show. Are we talking about the Jon Stewart who did “funny,” derogatory voice/character impressions of Bush and Cheney? Or is there another Jon Stewart out there?
I think he’s really good at fooling people into believing things that just aren’t true. I get it—people are fed up with a lot of things, and Stewart gives them a way to feel better. That’s not much different, though, from the Tea Party or the GOP candidates who fooled people into thinking the “Obamacare” bill can be repealed.
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Okay, almost 24 hours later and I finally got Issac’s Summer joke. I’m an idiot.
Swap the dog for a fire pit and it sounds like you’re writing about my back yard. Very nice.
funny, as your summer begins, another Summer ends.
And that, my friend, is love. Bob, I think I still owe you for my wedding cake, served in 1998. But nevermind.
I believe the kiss between Rob and I was documented on low-quality videotape in the mid-ninties porn classic, Dirty Harry…and Sticky.
“Do I have to sign some forms, or am I just considered ‘in.’” You’re in!
Got damn, Coulter. You are the greatest.
I have no specific memory of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d kissed Mike, too—once we’d both drunk ourselves gay. And earlier this week I gave Clarence Shelley a back rub. Do I have to sign some forms, or am I just considered “in.”
FWIW, I got a copy of the letter in question. It was written in a way that would be plausible to a casual reader who didn’t scrutinize it too carefully. It announced the formation of an organization called G.L.A.B.A. (which actually exists), and had discussion about typical…
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Oh nice! I’d totally vote for Matt Campbell!
“Smile Politely sports writer announces candidacy for city government.”
I also got to visit Big Grove Tavern during the soft open and definitely enjoyed the pork belly the most of all the dishes I sampled. The cheesy grits and the vinegary pickled vegetables were a perfect compliment to the rich pork belly.
The Alan Partridge lookalike on the right in the first small photo has nothing to condescend to anyone about. AH HA!
Snell and the little Hitlers of the neighborhood association need to chill out. Legitimate businesses should have the freedom to exist without having to endure the slings and arrows of ignorant and misguided opposition.
represent, Matt.
Yeah, I’d agree that Transporter Room 3 is the worst house venue I’ve ever seen.
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What? Echo! (Echo!) Where’s the dischord and dissent?
This weekend will mark the first appearance of Kayla Brown’s Fire Doll Candle booth at the Market. Check it: http://www.facebook.com/firedollcandles
And without bloodshed. Sounds like the Savoy trustees aren’t as narrow-minded as some of their whiny pants constituents. Do you think quack Snell is already planning an asinine counterattack or is he still laying low after those “threats” against his person?
hey, if hair ain’t gon’ be over your head, my jokes may as well be.
Okay, almost 24 hours later and I finally got Issac’s Summer joke. I’m an idiot.
Excellent. I am glad sometimes American dreams are encouraged, rather than stifled.
Swap the dog for a fire pit and it sounds like you’re writing about my back yard. Very nice.
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hey, if hair ain’t gon’ be over your head, my jokes may as well be.