Rally to Restore Sanity Likely Won’t
October 31, 2010 – Washington D.C.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s fair haired money makers, staged a Halloween eve rally on the Mall billed as the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”. The “or fear” part being a nod to Mr. Colbert – who responded to Mr. Stewart’s original sanity restoration project by launching his own “March to Keep Fear Alive”. The rallies were combined (once executives at Viacom understood, one imagines, how much these things cost) and a significant portion of the audiences of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report showed up to support the cause.
A chief criterion of success for the political rally these days, an obsession which dates from the Million Man March in 1995, is crowd size. Not wanting to be drawn into the various controversies occasioned by arguments about these things the US Park Service, the federal agency responsible for the National Mall, generally is reluctant to comment on crowd estimates. Smart. If size matters then a safe assumption is that 250,000 Americans showed up in the nation’s capital seeking to restore sanity - or maintain fear.
Estimating crowd size is not a particularly complex (or failure prone) science. Are such things as dueling crowd estimates these events typically leave in their media wake an indication political insanity?
Hardly.
It is unlikely that the political discourse in the United States is, in fact, insane. And if it were, the chances a couple of comedians and a quarter million sign carrying, well meaning liberals could do much to remedy the situation are limited.
Mr. Stewart is a brilliant and canny showman (disclosure: the Daily Show is the only television program I watch with any regularity). He’s funny, extremely smart and as this event shows, an ascendant star. Since taking over the Daily Show a decade ago he has steadily built ratings and provided hilarious and frequently intelligent insights on the political scene. In the process Mr. Stewart has acquired that most sought after prize in the post-modern world - The Brand.
That said, Jon Stewart is no serious student of political history. In fairness, few of us are. The country is certainly not enjoying the drowsy civility of the Eisenhower era at the moment. However, the climate of American political discourse is probably no more ‘insane’ than it was in the 1890’s when Sumner Redstone’s capitalist ancestor William Randolph Hurst was instrumental in starting a war with Spain. It was then that the term (but not the art of) ‘yellow journalism’ was born.
Granted, when Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh enrage the American Left with their views on immigration or taxation, the urge to describe their ideas as crazy is compelling. Cooler heads generally know that it’s mostly about selling newspapers (or TV ratings, or page views…)
Messrs. Hearst and Pulitzer: meet Glenn Beck and Chris Mathews.
The hyperbole game in our country is a cherished and well practiced art by both politicians and media practitioners. It’s not going away anytime soon. Does this mean the pundits and politicians – or the citizenry – have taken leave of their collective senses?
Probably not.
John L. Lewis described FDR’s first VP as “[a] labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking evil old man.” This doesn’t ring the modern ear as jarringly as Mr. Limbaugh’s “Ayatollah Obama” remarks or Bill Mahr’s description of the 9/11 hijackers as “brave”; what constitutes insane exists chiefly in the ear of the beholder.
Political correctness being what it is, political insanity is diagnosed with a frequency approaching childhood ADHD.
The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear will do little to improve the current tone of political debate. I’m not certain that’s even a worthy goal. But the current climate of political discussion is neither insane nor particularly unique. We are simply at the normative crest on the wave that has been resonating the tone of free speech in the U.S. since before the Revolutionary War.
I’ll take the Huffington Post and Matt Drudge - and you too Jon.
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story and picture © 2010 by Mark W. Lee - word count: 674
markwendelllee@gmail.com