A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend and the Rally to
Restore Sanity and/or
Fear came up. He immediately said, "I'm going! I need to let off some steam." Sounded like just the prescription I needed too -- a road trip to go hang out with 250,000 of my closest friends. So we all went.
What was it like? Crowded. Very. Very, very. As in,
very. I don't have claustrophobia, but I may have caught it at the rally. We kept trying to get within sight of the stage and large screens, but didn't quite succeed. Jon and Stephen were overly modest. They planned for a crowd of around 60,000, but estimates peg the rally attendance around 250,000 or as Jon Stewart declared, "ten million." Too bad his attempt to have everyone "count off" didn't quite work or we'd have an exact count. The crowd spilled off the National Mall in every direction for blocks and blocks. If you look at my photos, you can get a sense for just how crowded it was or you can see
whole thing on C-SPAN.
The most entertaining part was the signs. I took pictures,
lots and lots of them. People were quite
clever with their signs.
I think what the whole thing boiled down to is this: It's a mad, mad, mad world. It's not just the Tea-Party types to blame. It's not all Glenn Beck's fault. It's not all Obama's fault. It's not even all my fault. It's everyone's fault. Our government has just become a damn mess. It's always been fractured, and was even designed to be that way, but lately the rhetoric seems to "go to 11."
In this environment it seems that that rational middle is missing. Maybe it's not. Maybe there is some quality compromise that goes on in Congress, but you'd never know it based on the way things are reported on Fox News or MSNBC. The other side is evil and to blame.
I think this event was about stepping back, taking a breath, and saying, "Can't we all just laugh a little?" It was cathartic.
The event proved a mass demonstration of noncommittal cleverness, quirk and irony. Through signage, some rally-goers competed to be the most topical ("One man's socialism is another man's uninformed buzzword"), the most off-topical ("I love pineapples") and the most meta ("I am holding a sign").
Many Mall visitors toted signs with arch witticisms such as those identifying the carrier as a member of the "Decaf Party," or warning people "Don't Tread on Snakes," instead of "Don't Tread on Me." Plenty of gear from Obama's inauguration was exhumed from closets and worn again, and many posters borrowed Shepard Fairey's iconic "Hope" design from 2008 - but the visage staring out was of Stewart, not Obama.
It wasn't a singular, coherent movement on display as much as a rollicking expanse of nano-movements. Recycling enthusiasts mingled with D.C. voting rights advocates, who bumped shoulders with fusion-power activists who stepped on the heels of 9/11 truthers. One sign implored, "Vote Lawyers Out," and another insisted, "Vote Popped Collars Out." Some in the crowd wanted the troops to come home; others wanted the troops to be able to gay-marry.
And then there were the signs about signs, like one held by visiting New Yorker Beth Seltzer: "Americans for . . . oh look! A puppy!"
"There's so many people out there who are easily distracted," said the 39-year-old doctor. "And there are people who are yelling and screaming and protesting and they don't even know what they're talking about."
As a Gamecock I might get in trouble for quoting this next part of the story, but I guess I need to apply some sanity even to learning something my rivals:
"I do vote," says Teddi Fishman, 46, the director of the Center for Academic Integrity in Clemson, S.C. "But more than entertainment or politics, I just think this is a release for everyone. We've had so much tension."
Who knows what America needs. Maybe it is just
more cowbell.
