Washington DC – Considering the trouncing of the Democrats on Tuesday (November 2), including the victory of several Tea Party candidates – not to mention many of their backers, who fear there’s a plot to replace the constitution with sharia law, helped by a secret Muslim-socialist president – it’s pretty safe to say America has completely lost its mind.
Wasn’t that why the country needed comedic cable superstars Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and their October 30 Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear? This attempt to change the political climate sure raised expectations. Even noted liberal Arianna Huffington had hopes: she paid for free buses from New York for thousands.
Stewart, after all, was in a perfect position, as Naomi Klein phrased it, to move the centre. Well, maybe not so much move it more like politely ask it to “Please, if you don’t mind, just edge to the left a little.”
But I’m not sure whether I over- or underestimated Stewart. Did he help mobilize moderates who presumably would vote Democrat? And if, as Stewart says, this wasn’t the point, what was it? I still don’t know if the event was more about playing things safe than keeping things sane.
When I arrived at DC’s National Mall close to the crack of dawn, thousands of people were there already – many of them with their own signs appropriate for the event’s unusual mix of protest and humour (or you could say for an event protesting the lack of humour in the current polarized political climate).
One rallier, Donna Dellet, held a sign that read “Palin, O’Donnell, Bachmann!! Is that what I burned my bra for?” referring to the three outspoken Tea Party women.
Dellet told me she attended a bra-burning protest in the 1970s not far from where she was now standing. In effect, she wanted this rally not so much to move the centre as to stop the centre from moving back to the right.
Another participant compared the rally to anti-war activists famously sticking flowers into the guns of soldiers.
In the midst of the happening, I realized that I was watching a variety show whose humour was on the slapstick end of the comedic spectrum as opposed to the satirical.
Notable exceptions were Daily Show correspondents Wyatt Cenac and Jason Jones’s spoof on reporters’ spin. Other memorable moments included the interruption of Yusuf Islam singing his classic Peace Train by Ozzy Osbourne performing the substantially less peaceful and less sane Crazy Train.
I couldn’t help thinking when Colbert was, as per his shtick, giving out awards for exemplary fear or cowardice, that he should have given one to Yusuf for essentially condoning the late-80s fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
The comic portion climaxed with Colbert’s Fear, in the form of a giant puppet, melting like the Wicked Witch of the West. A modern moral fable, I suppose, but not exactly Kafka, maybe not even Seuss.
It was only during the rally’s final minutes that Stewart became more earnest, emphasizing the need for non-partisanship, compromise and an end to ideological divisiveness. He offered strikingly evenhanded dissing, swiping at both Fox News on the right and liberal-leaning MSNBC.
“Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people who are just a little bit late for something they have to do…. Impossible things every day that are only made possible by the little reasonable compromises we all make,” said Stewart.
So in the end, even at its most serious, the message stayed, well, stubbornly temperate. The centre didn’t budge. While most people I spoke with agreed with Stewart’s non-partisan message, some, like me, felt that at a time of rising lunacy he was far too soft.
Later, I tried to sort it all out. Did Stewart let us down or ease the flow of common sense in the midst of the illogic? A substantially left friend of mine who didn’t want to attend the rally dryly referred to it as Liberalpalooza. I had to tell her she was wrong: it wasn’t even that. Nor was it Lilith Fair, for that matter. It was Laissez-faire.
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