CinemaSlants: The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall, August 28, 1963

“Bow before us, minions! Kneel before Zod!” – Stephen Colbert on the National Mall, October 30, 2010.

No longer will anyone doubt the influence of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Here are two comedians who host 30-minute late-night fake news shows on a channel that regularly broadcasts the direct-to-video American Pie sequels and stand-up comedy specials from the 90’s, yet on Saturday, October 30 they were the organizers of one of the largest rallies Washington, D.C. has ever seen. Early estimates have put the attendance at around 215,000 and I believe it. Why? Because I was there!

While seeing this gargantuan number of people at the rally was inspiring, it made getting there a nightmare in every way. Due to endless traffic delays I did not arrive until around noon on the nose, which was just as the Roots were beginning their performance with John Legend. It was hard to gauge my final position at the time with all the insanity (!) but I would wager that I ended up right… about…

Here

So yeah. I could not see the stage directly, but for the most part hearing was not that hard, despite the fact that the nearest speakers were a ways away. (Suggestion to the MythBusters: next time you speak in front of 200,000 people or so, speak up.) I could mostly see one of the monitors which aided the peasants like me, but not quite enough to get the entirety of the performance. There were impressive musical guests and the like, but I was wondering how the people in even worse positions than me were keeping themselves sane.

The real joy was walking around Washington, D.C. rather than watching the event itself, which was mostly a concert/comedy show. I have no problem with that, but at the end of the day the rally wasn’t really about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and that’s where the greatest impact was for me. What made this event so wholly unique was the experience of seeing all the people who gathered to celebrate their fatigue with the current state of politics and the media. Some of the signs and costumes were brilliant, and captured the spirit of the rally. Some missed the point, but most understood that this rally was a celebration of moderation and the fact that mindless yelling and name-calling is leading the nation nowhere.

The event itself merely acted as an epicenter of sorts, and the crowds spread from the Mall and across D.C. in every direction. People had their dogs, their children, and they brought all kinds of props for the purpose of spreading the message of sanity and/or fear. There was a gigantic pirate ship on either Pennsylvania or Constitution Avenues (I forget) and the people, in general were all really nice. Nobody comes to the Rally to Restore Sanity to start a fight, but instead there was a true feeling of unity behind the “take it down a notch” ideology.

This rally will inevitably be compared and contrasted with Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” Rally which occurred on August 28 of this year in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The messages are undoubtedly polar opposites, and as such I was intrigued to see is the much younger fan base of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would rise up and make the drive to the Rally. To be honest I was incredibly skeptical. I had visions of many people my age seeing the rally announcement, getting excited, then relenting to sit back and watch the rally while feasting from a bag of Cheetos.

I have never been more gloriously proven wrong. The more-or-less “official” number for the “Restoring Honor” rally was 87,000, though we may never know for sure. This number is lower than Beck is willing to admit, but if I threw a rally I’d argue for the highest possible number as well. Nonetheless, it has been made clear by plenty that the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear absolutely trumped Beck’s get-together, totaling more than twice the attendees that Beck did. As Stewart said at the beginning of the rally, the most important factors to a rally’s success is not “the intellectual coherence of the content” but instead “color and size”. On that level the rally succeeded impeccably.

AskMen.com, the online destination for all things that make Spike TV look too cerebral, named Jon Stewart the most influential man of 2010 on its annual list. Before this rally I was skeptical as to this, but perhaps this is more legitimate than I believed. In general, people have flocked to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report because they turn a mirror on everything wrong with politics and the media. This weekend proved that only do their viewers laugh at how everything is going to hell in a handbasket, but they are fired up by these shows. They want to do something about it, and as such they went out of their way to show up and rally behind the cause of reason and sanity. Watching the rally on television likely restricted the experience as a whole to what was happening onstage, and let me tell you that was merely a fraction of what made the weekend so great.

At one point Stewart went full-suit and came out for a “moment of sincerity” to talk about his reason for holding the rally. Here is what he said:

“I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies, but unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24-hour politico pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen, or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire. […] If we amplify everything we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned. […] I feel good. Strangely, calmly good. The image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a funhouse mirror. […] If the picture of us were true, of course our inability to solve problems would be actually quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists, actively subverting our Constitution? Or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own? We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. The truth is: we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV, but Americans don’t live here or on cable TV. Where we live out values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevents us from getting things done. Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Most Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do. Often something they don’t want to do, but they do it. Impossible things, every day, that are only made possible through the little, reasonable compromises we all make. […] If you want to know why I’m here and what I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence is what I wanted. Sanity has always been and will always be in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today, and the kind of people that you are has restored mine.”

I know that was a lot of reading but Stewart put it as beautifully as anyone could have. He is one of the most important personalities on television because he is completely and utterly of his moment. Ignore the pundits of MSNBC and Fox News, because the majority of Americans don’t watch them. Most don’t even vote, but that doesn’t mean they’re lazy. In most cases they are doing something else that is feeding their family. The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was not a condemnation of America but a celebration of the America you never see: the one that truly exists.

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On that note here is a picture of my personal favorite of the costumes I saw in person on Saturday, the Gay Bearrorist. (Not my picture, for the record).