Today is the big Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington, D.C. It is a creation of Jon Stewart, and it’s not completely clear what the intended goal is (other than incidentally boosting ratings of his show on basic cable’s Comedy Central). He had President Obama on the show as a guest this week. In fact, the guest list on “The Daily Show” is more impressive than the list on the traditional public affairs programs like “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation.”
Jon Stewart tends to ask more difficult questions than the “real” news people. He’s much more willing to call BS on a guest who is shoveling it out, and never hesitates to show last week’s tape of a guest saying the exact opposite of what he or she is saying today. But it is generally done with a sense of civility that is rare on TV today.
In other words, the self-described fake news show has become the most trusted source of real news and news analysis. The real news shows have descended into a slightly more highbrow version of “Cops” or “Shocking Police Chases.” The cable news breaks down into Fox and the Anti-Fox, and has become nothing more than irrational shouting.
Stewart’s big rally in Washington this week, with satellite rallies held all over the place, is intended to call attention to the 99 percent of Americans who don’t go to rallies. This is a rally for the great rational center; a rally for people who have stuff to do. As Stewart’s website puts it, these are people who don’t think it is ever appropriate to draw a Hitler moustache on anybody other than Hitler, or occasionally Charlie Chaplin. They are the non-screamers; people who are concerned but not hysterical. They have lawns to mow (or snow to plow), kids’ soccer games to go to and oil changes to get done. These are the responsible folks who quietly go about living their lives and wish that elected officials would equally quietly go about solving problems that need to be solved. I suspect the Rally to Restore Sanity will be overwhelmingly attended by people who rotate their tires regularly.
I won’t be at the rally. When I looked at airfare to Washington and hotel rates there, I concluded I would have to be insane to spend that kind of money. But it would be fascinating to be there and see what it turns out to be. I’m sure there will be a few people on both fringes who show up and try to claim the event as their own trying to paint the Hitler moustache on it.
I don’t know that anybody really has a good sense of how many will actually show up on the National Mall, or what they will do once they get there. Stewart may have some metric for success, but I have no idea if that is 10,000 or 100,000 people. I also don’t know what either end of that scale means, since this is a demonstration by and for non-demonstrative people. If you sponsor a convention for hermits and nobody comes, I think that would be a successful event.
It kind of defeats the purpose if people show up with angry placards. But messages of reason and moderation are difficult to reduce to three or four misspelled words scrawled on a poster festooned with teabags. “Perhaps we should consider congressional term limits” doesn’t make a really catchy chant. Stewart is quick to make that point, observing that the nature and complexity of the challenges ahead require more than a Tweet’s worth of words to solve. In the end, I suspect that very few windows will be broken or police cars tipped over and set ablaze. It’s probably going to be a lot of people just hanging out on the national mall for a while, then visiting the monuments before finding a nice deli for lunch. They might visit the Smithsonian, or just try to beat the crowd on the subway back to the hotel.
There are days when it would be quite satisfying to see Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity locked in the octagon smashing folding chairs over each other’s heads. But they do that more or less every night on TV already, and nothing productive has come from it. Useful ideas aren’t hatched that way. Maybe, just maybe, a hundred thousand people standing on the National Mall, calmly talking things over like a bunch of Unitarians gathered around the coffee pot, will be the kind of demonstration of civil discourse that can change the direction and tone of things. It’s a long shot, but well worth the effort.
Go vote on Tuesday. It will make you feel better.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs on Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.