The true hysterics: Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear makes people laugh, not cry

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- There have been many reports, but no clear consensus, on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” held Oct. 30 in Washington, D.C. So many that, on Nov.11, the comedian - who prides himself on satire, not politics, and rarely gives interviews of his own -- felt the need to sit down and speak with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to clear up a few things.

“Whatever you put out, you can only control your intention,” Stewart said. “You can’t control how people perceive it.”

“And you can control your execution,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

Ironically, the rally became an item of controversy largely because it didn’t have much of it --  at least not politically speaking. As anyone who heard him speak on the Mall - live, streaming or on TV -- can attest, Stewart wasn’t so much concerned with amplifying political engagement as much as promoting moderation in the media’s coverage of the political arena. This is good, because, now that the Democrats were utterly decimated in the mid-term elections, it means it wasn’t entirely we rallygoers’ fault. 

I say “we” because I was there. And for my money -- minus an ill-advised and slightly nonsensical appearance by Kid Rock -- Stewart’s event was a more than welcome, nearly note-perfect, non-partisan slap in the face to general media and political hysteria. 

To the beginning: At the end of October, on a warm windy, blue-sky day, my friend Erin -- an old college roommate-turned-DC-ite -- and I headed into downtown Washington, bringing with us signs, coffee, snacks, and our mutual irritation with punditry and uber-partisans. After attempting to board an impossibly overtaxed metro system - trains stuffed with socially conscious rallygoers led to mammoth overflow and and a borderline desperate commute on metro lines all over the city -- we finally, with two other like-minded gents, managed to snag a cab downtown to the event, two hours after we left Erin’s apartment

Giddy and exhausted, Erin and I finally arrived on the scene, bearing our own signs with slogans stolen nearly directly from Stewart himself. Mine, bright yellow and emblazoned with Kermit-green lettering, said simply: “I disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler.” Erin’s riffed on another of the comedian’s proposals: “I am not afraid of Muslims, Tea Partiers, Socialists, immigrants, gun owners or gays,” her sign declared.

On the back: “But I am scared of spiders.”

If there was any insanity inherent to the rally, it was logistic in nature, and had nothing to do with events onstage. Both Erin and I knew people who expected to be there, but finding them proved impossible; some attempted to forge their way into the city and gave up, and others were indeed there, but utterly unreachable. In an amusing turn, the rush on the Mall led to a total jamming of cellphone signals; AT&T and Verizon were overwhelmed, and no one on the grounds was able to call or text anyone else who may or may not have been there.

Call it the true test of wills for the mobile generation -- the fact that we all shrugged and happily gave up can be considered scientific proof we all still have souls.

Erin and I eventually wedged ourselves in the third section back -- more than halfway up, but not by much. At a scant five feet six inches tall, I had to rely on the JumboTrons set up around the Mall for a view. As I watched a handful of girls scale the shoulders of their boyfriends for a better view, I made a mental note to never again date someone sans broad shoulders or who stands less than six feet tall in a slouch. Standing four inches above me, Erin had better visual options, but not much.
 
Ignore vertical disadvantage: It was worth putting up with. The Rally to Restore Sanity was exactly what Erin and I were searching for: A brief, shining beacon of rationality in a land of otherwise pure political nonsense. It was as though, for one day, a quarter of a million people stood together on the National Mall to recognize how important it is that we, as a country, remember to take our meds.

We got to see the Roots perform, and, in one of the event’s highest-flying moments of pure creative inspiration, we saw Yusef Islam, nee Cat Stevens, duel musically with Ozzy Osbourne. Sam Waterston -- the most “seemingly reasonable man in America” read an original piece of Colbert poetry. Farther Guido Sarducci, a ‘70s-era “Saturday Night Live” character played by Don Novello, was on hand to give the benediction.

Fr. Sarducci asked God to please endorse the one, true religion, perhaps by having swans fly overhead, or by spontaneously tatoo-ing the face of one of the religion’s subscribers. Needless to say, it didn’t work, and the mystery remains. Which, if you ask me, is sort of the point.

We weathered that rather inexplicable performance by Kid Rock,  alternately laughed politely, then maniacally, on cue for the Mythbusters, and witnessed a worried Colbert rise from his “Fear Bunker” 2,000 feet below the earth - or 10 feet below the stage -- Chilean-miner style.

Why was Stephen so preoccupied? He thought nobody would show up.

He didn’t have to worry. He was greeted by 250,000 ecstatic, sign-toting rallygoers of all ages, races and political persuasions -- though, truth be told, the masses largely consisted of liberal, white twentysomethings.

Their missions -- and mine, for I fall quite happily into that category -- united under the umbrella of sanity restoration, but took on many forms.

“Fascism, Communism and Socialism are not interchangeable,” one sign snapped at theory-lax Tea Partiers, while another, held by a bundled-up protester, simply read “Nudist on Strike!”

Another, in a nod to Colbert’s assertion that bears, not terrorists, are the number one threat to America, featured a gun-wielding grizzly in camouflage and declared, “Lions and Tigers and Bearrorists! Oh. My. God.”

Yet another was a testament to the attention spans of the “Sesame Street” generation: “I admire your passion -- wait, did you see that squirrel?”

That wasn’t my sign, but it could have been.

But for all its amiability, its hysterics about hysterics and its low-key attitude, make no mistake: The Rally had ambitions, and so did the people who went. They just weren’t the sorts of partisan, easily defined ambitions that normally make the news.

But the essence of the rally raised its hand when Stewart introduced Cat Stevens -- you’ll always be Cat Stevens to me; sorry dude --  and lyrics we’ve all grown up with turned into music, pure and present, and instantly alive.

“I've been happy lately, thinking about the good things to come” -- the words fairly floated, lofting somewhere around the crowd’s head. Me being terminally unable to not relate personal experiences to movies, I felt like I’d stepped into a scene from Forrest Gump. “And I believe it could be, something good has begun.”

In truth, whether or not you’re keeping an eye out for Jenny, there’s a certain magic to hearing a peace song in a rally setting. It lasted for a moment, until a faux-enraged Colbert interrupted. When he did, even my besotted soul -- he’s one of my future husbands, don’t you know? -- felt the urge to second the crowd’s ascending boos with my own “shut up, shut up, shut UP!”

Then Ozzy Osbourne entered, raucous humor ensued, and the rally got back on track. Stewart of course protested Osbourne’s performance of “Crazy Train,” and, after a minor musical stand-off between the two diverse, uh, legends, the two clever co-hosts finally settled on a performance of “Love Train,” by the O’Jays. Colbert was doubtful, but Stewart quickly assured him that love is indeed a fearful concept, because of “STDs and heartbreak,” and so Colbert was put at ease.

Anyone still worried that the Comedy Central team might have overstepped their bounds could put their fears aside.

That said, the rally resonated deeply with me, even when I was doubled-over with laughter - because of how much it utterly reflected how I felt about the way our nation - its politicians, its individuals and its media - handles itself in terms of political discourse.

And despite the good-natured, wickedly en-pointe, organized chaos of the prior rally vignettes, Stewart’s keynote speech, delivered at the rally’s end, was pointed, earnest, sharp in its humor, its insight and its assertion of blame.

The comedian aptly described how Americans live their daily lives, not as partisans, but “as people just a little bit late for something they have to do.”

Or, he argued, when a bunch of cars must whittle themselves down to two lanes from five, what do we, as a people, generally cope? We don’t push and shove -- that’s too expensive, and requires too much paperwork. We take turns.

“You go, then I go,” Stewart said, simply.

I thought about that. I thought about trying to drive my car in that line. And truth be told, I really do that. I’d done it the day before, on my way to DC.

“OK, you go, then I go,” I’d said -- we say -- in variations. “OK, you go, then I go. YOU’RE VOTING FOR CHRISTINE O’DONNELL? Well OK, you might want to get an IQ test or consider sterilization, but that’s a personal decision and I respect that, so please: Be my guest. You go, then I go.”

Many have asked what the point of the rally was. Many of those many were journalists who weathered, perhaps a bit defensively, Stewart’s unexpectedly stinging attack on them. It’s true Stewart never once reminded the crowd to vote in the midterms elections.  He just asked them to stop watching hysterical people who give the news, and to try to stop promoting hysteria themselves.

“We work together to get things done every damn day,” Stewart said during his speech, of Americans in general. “The only place we don’t is here” -- he gestured to Washington at large -- “and on cable TV.”

And despite what anybody says on TV, whatever anyone says the rally really meant or accomplished, that’s all any rallygoers really wanted to hear: Reality is not “as seen on TV,” as much as we’d like to think so. And governing doesn’t happen in giant leaps and bounds. Your beliefs can be as extreme as you like, but true governing takes place in moderation. In little steps and daily compromised. We’d just like our politicians and cable news networks to remember that, or at least take note of it, for once in their lives.

That and, when presented with a laugh or cry situation, we’d really rather laugh.

Additional Images: