The Rally for Sanity: Really?

Unless you've been willfully ignoring mass media, you've heard about Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity". I went. I never do such things. I've been to some political events before, but all when I was in college and all when I stumbled on things going on in NYC. Mostly they turned me off. Rallying never seemed to make much of a difference. So I'm going to attempt to explain a bit about why I did go to this, and give some impressions of what I saw.

When I told people I was going, I was asked a number of questions about the motives of the rally: "Isn't it just a concert and a show?" "Isn't it just the same old liberal media/MSM folks doing something to copy Glen Beck?" "Isn't this just to make Jon Stewart richer?" "Isn't this just a proxy rally for the Democrats?" "Isn't this just a big reaction to the tea party?" "Isn't this just an anti-fox news rally?" The answer to all of these is the same. Maybe so. There's no way for me to know what the real motivations are. But I didn't go for any of those reasons, though some of them are appealing and others are quite unappealing to me. I went for one simple reason. The political discourse in this country is broken. There is no real dialogue. There is a series of monologues. Even if it was only on the surface, the stated reason for this event was to try and counter that with some sanity, reason and thoughtfulness. And if it was going to be just a bit like that, it seemed worth supporting. Throw in that my wife really wanted to go, too, and that we have friends in the DC area we could hook up with, and we had enough motivation to make it.

There were some other questions I was commonly asked: "Isn't this rally every bit as extreme but on the other side [than the tea party]?" "You always complain about big money interfering in politics, and isn't this just that and not even trying to hide it?" "You say you're an independent, but you're going to a democratic rally - why?" "What good is it to gather around paid celebrities when it comes to politics?" How extreme, how democratic (versus independent) and how celebrity focused the rally was were things I didn't think I could judge without seeing it. And, even if it turned out to be all three, that idea of a calmer kind of discourse was appealing enough for me to get over it. And I liked that they were not trying to hide who was sponsoring the event, why and with what biases. I wish every political event was so obvious about where the money comes from. I'm for transparency above all things. Comedy Central simply must be shocked at how much success they've gotten from Jon Stewart. It's not like he had such a stellar track record previous to The Daily Show. It's my opinion that the content really does come from him and his crew if only because his success was his own formula and no executive would ever mess with a cash cow once it started delivering the milk.

The stuff on stage was OK. Not incredibly inspiring and not all that political - at least not directly. Having the Mythbuster guys was a nod to science, I'd guess. A bit of a lame one, but I'll take it. Stewart and Colbert were very funny, as they usually are. But if you've seen their act before it was nothing shocking. Stewart did his best to be heartfelt and did better than usual at it, but kept it brief and mercifully un-hokey. The one thing that really did it for me was Tony Bennett singing America the Beautiful. That was awesome. And I have to say that it was nice that it ended promptly as promised.

The interesting bits for me were in the crowd. First of all, everyone was so polite. There were a LOT of people there. And I saw nor heard any squabbling or mean words. Maybe every rally of like minded people is like that. But I've been to other big events (concerts, etc.) and never seen a crowd behave so well. Of course there were signs. Most were about issues, and most of those simply urged people to participate in politics and remain civil. The second highest concentration went for comedy. Some were more directly political. Of the political ones, most were anti tea party pundit. I say tea party pundit and not tea party because most were concerned with Palin, O'Donnell and other tea party celebrities. I saw only one sign that mentioned the tea party without pointing directly at those personalities. The only other political signs were supporting Obama and most of those were the ones with the Obama campaign image and the byline "probably not trying to destroy America". Overall, I thought the crowd was living up to the billing. Everyone was being engaged, topical yet civil. There was no one I saw that seemed to be "extreme" in any way save perhaps their willingness to go the extra mile for a cool Halloween costume - there were quite a few very realistic zombies roaming the crowd.

I was disappointed not to see any right leaning or conservative voices being overtly represented. There were some signs pointing out overspending and one saying that "to reduce spending one ought to look at the biggest parts of the budgets". That was about as conservative as it got. I knew it would be a socially liberal crowd, which is fine with me. And I was handed and subsequently wore a Panned Parenthood sticker supporting better access to birth control. And there were other represenatives of various social causes roaming the crowds to hand out materials. But I had hoped there would be more at least overtly centerist participation. But maybe that's a symptom of people like myself with a libertarian streak also not being the type to carry signs. Judging by the number of folks who were my age and older, which while not the majority were absolutely 40% of the people I saw by my reckoning, there may have been a lot of people thinking the same things. But there's no way to tell.

If I had to give the rally a grade based on it's stated purposes, it would be a B+. The crowd may get an A. But the content gets a B-. I give the crowd a bit more weight because a rally really ought to be about what happens in the crowd as near as I can tell. I would have liked to see more intellectual meat on the stage, and less clips from news media. I was happy I went. Partially because it was a good time all in, including seeing friends, getting time with the wife away from home and taking advantage of rewards programs I fatten through so much travel for work. But it was also good to have gone to see that there are many people who seem to want to take the volume level in politics down a few notches. And it was very heartening that so many seemed to support a scientific worldview - I wore a tee shirt with Einstein on it in a faux Che silhouette and the byline "viva la relativity" and it got a huge number of positive comments and thumbs up from the crowd. So while I didn't get anything but good entertainment from what was on stage, I did feel I got something worthwhile from the other people there.