In October I attended two very different rallies in Washington, DC. And I did not attend a third, which was different in a different way.
The third rally was actually the first, chronologically: Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” shindig in August. My honor felt like it was in pretty good shape, and I didn’t see the need to hear someone jawbone others for their lack of same, so I took a pass. Somewhere around 90,000 people attended.
On October 2, the One Nation rally was held at the same site at Beck’s—the Lincoln Memorial. It was a very earnest affair and quite boring. The crowd size was impressive, but not overwhelming, and probably less than Beck’s. It was a decidedly more diverse collection of citizens. Did event have an impact on the midterm elections a month later? Who knows.
Four weeks later, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, a couple of comedians on the Comedy Central network, held their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear at the east end of the Mall. Since no one knew what the event was actually going to be, it seems clear a lot of people came primarily to help create numbers bigger than Beck’s (and they most certainly succeeded in that). The Metro was seriously unprepared for the crowds.* The event itself was underequipped in the sound and video departments. After an hour or so of inching forward, we never got close enough to see more than a jumbotron a few blocks ahead or to hear much more than an occasional phrase (for some reason, Colbert seemed to carry better than Stewart). The density of the crowd and the inability to participate in the event reminded me of our crummy experience at Obama’s inauguration (the “Purple Tunnel of Doom” and ancillary doomlets associated with the infamous purple ticket). The atmosphere, however, was better—literally (the weather was beautiful) and figuratively (most people seemed resigned to it being a “be-in”). The signs and street theater were great, as you would expect from lefty iconoclasts, activists, anarchists, and goofballs: some absurd, some serious, some so pithily true they seemed downright Mosaic. I have yet to watch the stage performances online, and probably never will.
Janet Malcolm’s take on the two October events pretty much jibes with my experience, although I think she leaned a little to hard on notion that the Stewart/Colbert ralliers were a bunch of self-satisfied fanboys and fangirls. There was significant diversity in age though less in race than at the One Nation rally, but on balance it looked more like “my” America than the one the Beckolytes want to “take back.” My problem was this: I wanted to take part in a March to Keep Fear Alive, not stand around watching someone be “reasonable.” I wanted to participate physically in a purely sardonic statement about the monster that has driven so much decision-making for the past almost-ten years. But the march disappeared from the planning almost immediately after it became clear that Stewart/Colbert viewers were going to hold them to their boast of having a rally on the Mall, and Stewart’s lukewarm, übersensible pox-on-both-extremes views became the driving force, whereby marching gave way to a cobbled-together stage show and Colbert’s acidic, bracingly insane faux-rightism was bottled up and very sparingly used. The name of the event itself betrayed its schizophrenic origins, and its internal contradictions never really resolved themselves into a coherent message. Which was the point, for Jon Stewart, master of the false equivalence. I don’t regret being there, but I felt kind of stupid afterward. Certainly no saner. As for the country as a whole, fear has a way of squeezing out sanity, and fear is still very much afoot.
Contrary to the fears of some Democratic operatives that it would prove a harmful distraction from the very serious task at hand, children, I think the Оctober 30 rally probably helped Dems on November 2. I think it raised the spirits of those to the left of the ever-rightening center who felt there was no hope, in general; and no point in trying to minimize the traditional midterm losses, in particular. Just a little.
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*How my daughter and I got down there is a story in itself. After waiting more than an hour for a train (they were running frequently, but every one was overstuffed), we decided to see how close we could get driving. We took another father-daughter team with us (they’re from the outer ‘burbs and had their own tale of woe), and luckily he knew of some good parking garages downtown. Unfortunately, we arrived on the Mall about two hours later than we’d planned.
