Thoughts on the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

I spent the weekend at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear with my sister in Washington DC. While I don’t usually talk too much about politics on Overthinking It, I figured the event warranted some discussion, because, in addition to being politics, it’s pop culture, it’s important, and it’s illustrative of its cultural moment. Like Lee did for ComicCon, I’ll add more, better pictures in a future entry — expect more talk about my experiences here, because it was a really complex event and fun to think and talk about.

I want to start with Jon Stewart’s keynote speech, because it’s packaged in such a way that it’s easy to talk about, which will create the impression in history that it was also the most important part of the rally, so let’s go with that reading for the moment (thanks to chapterofmylife for posting in good quality, if it stays up long enough for everybody to see it):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ntvifshfWg

Stewart has long ground this specific axe as his most urgent and sincerely political position — through the 24 news cycle and journalotainment (my word, but if he can use “conflictinator,” indulge me) the press manufactures alarm and choreographs conflict while overlooking substance and responsibility. The press serves an essential function in a democracy — Stewart refers to it as our “immune system.” So, when the press falls asleep at the wheel or turns on its duties (one could say when it “shirks” its duties, but in my opinion this ascribes less systematic malevolence and corruption to the much of the press than is accurate), the results are bad for the country and the world.

It’s the same thing Stewart talked about way back on the now-defunct-but-quaint-by-comparison-to-today’s-propoganda-horrors Crossfire six years ago, when he came into his own as a political force:

More on Stewart’s avowed politics, the politics of the rally, and the politics of art and festivals (because, despite not being seen as such by many, this was a comedy and arts festival), after the jump —

The uphill battle

Jon Stewart and his posse hosted a big rally where they got people together for reasons they don’t entirely understand. This much is clear. It is also clear that Stewart’s most deliberate intention in all of this – the fire in his belly that got this whole thing going – was to demonstrate opposition to the destructive tendencies and dereliction of duty in contemporary popular media. Unfortunately, and I’d wager as a comedian Stewart understands this, because comedians understand more than most the futile demands of the sane mind — he almost certainly isn’t going to win.

This is very important for how the rally functioned and what I think it means, so I’ll go into it a bit, at risk of being too political. I apologize if my ranting is discourteous to any of our readers in their own political commitments.

Actually, I’ll remark on that for a second, because this was very obvious at the rally if you actually went rather than read the half-pre-scripted coverage in places like the New York Times. This was very much not a Democratic rally. Stewart never talked about the midterm elections. The big guests were not politicians, but musicians. There was no call to action involving getting out the vote. There wasn’t even an endorsement of one political party over another by the people running the rally (the attendees, well, we’ll get to that). Anybody who expected this to be some sort of October Surprise for the Congressional Democrats must have been sorely disappointed.

The media organization bashed the most by the rally itself was not Fox News but NPR, for its overreaction to Juan Williams’ rude but harmless comments (more than one person I talked to found the references to it more than a little conspicuous — so it isn’t just me).

Media outlets widely seen as liberal were given the first Medal of Fear by Steve Colbert for their unwillingness to cover the rally so as not to appear biased, which casts light on the media outlets’ own self-conscious political machinations that interfere with their objectivity and ability to do their jobs.

If the rally was driven by Democrats, it wasn’t very nice to its supposed friends.

I think the issues Stewart and Colbert discussed are somewhat party-neutral. Yes, there is conspicuous alignment between Republican leadership and the media outlets it controls, but that leadership doesn’t speak for all Republicans, and not all the people voting Republican on Tuesday are willing to call themselves Republicans. It’s unfortunate what will happen to the agenda of fiscal responsibility once the election is over and the Republican semi-dependents realize the people who control their party aren’t really very conservative in their economic and fiscal policies, but, hey, you can’t blame them for trying to change things, and metadiscourse doesn’t inherently prefer one tax policy over another.

If I were a conservative — though I confess I’m not on balance, even if I am on some issues — I think I’d want a free and independent press that felt responsibility for accurate reporting and some dignity and perspective rather than self-destructive, nonstop myopic hysteria.

I’d want to know what was really happening so I knew how to adjust to it and help formulate and work toward constructive, responsible, low-cost solutions  that didn’t impinge on people’s liberties too much, or so that I could work toward solutions to problems through the institutions I believed were appropriate for addressing them. The need for a free press isn’t diminished whether you prefer social policy to charity or the military to the State Department – it’s something the members of both parties should be interested in, and a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, where it has become a dominant strategy to destroy it that has resulted in a net negative for everybody.

(The previous example, of course, relies on the extent to which knowing what is “actually happening” is possible, but seeing that I am a conservative in this scenario, I’m probably not going to invoke Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation while watching the news).

Back to Stewart’s uphill battle

Okay,  so, we’re still talking about Stewart’s speech at the rally here (writing thousands of words about 15 minutes of a daylong rally, yeah that’s overthinking), and really just the salient points at the heart of it. The two-party system isn’t put forth as a solution. The media certainly isn’t put forth as a solution. Stewart doesn’t say “keep listening to me and watching my show and I will fix this.” Stewart articulates a problem, but the solutions he proposes are the sort that people don’t tend to do on their own — like being good friends and neighbors, turning off their TVs and going outside, and calming down and being adults about things. It’s like telling somebody they really should eat healthily — yeah, they should, and some will, but most won’t, because the economic fundamentals are too strong.

The rally isn’t going to solve Stewart’s problem with the press — it’s not even going to come close to solving the problem. The economic fundamentals are too heavily stacked against it. The profit motive for media organizations to keep going the way things are dwarfs what they can make just producing news. They can make a lot more money — for their own books, for their own pockets, and through various complex business relationships — selling de facto editorial control of news outlets to private companies (that will turn profits by influencing government policy) than they can make selling time to the Pine-Sol lady and the Scooter Store.

The older media model.

It turns out the market has been undervaluing control of the government (mostly in terms of short-term payouts in taxes and contracts – not really thinking about the long-term health of the economy, because hey that stuff is CRAZY, amirite?) at a time when media is relatively cheap and easy to produce and distribute and media professionals are suffering a ton of underemployment, a big influx of new skilled workers, a nosedive in the cost of basic technology and downward wage pressure. These sorts of adjustments – where prices move and shift buying and selling patterns, are notoriously difficult to fight or reverse. The markets are very very powerful.

As a result, formally private institutions that are virtual arms of government entities heavily influence what is said on the news through a series of think tanks, astroturf groups and PR organizations. Those same organizations overtly fund the television stations and other media outlets by becoming a major source of ad revenue (one of the few growing ones). In turn, being free of the responsibility to produce news in line with journalistic integrity (which is expensive) lets them operate with skeleton crews of underpaid staff while making only sensationalist stories, which people will gravitate toward watching.

It’s win win win win … until it’s lose.

To give you a sense for the extent of this media/political machine Stewart is calling out, they even channel funding and influence to sites like Overthinking It through institutions like Google Ads, which we can’t control and have no better alternative to at our scale and level of operations (with our whopping zero full-time employees and reliance on donations to keep our servers going even with advertising all over the place).

For example, while the people at OTI are of varying political persuasions, we all have gay friends (mutual ones, whom we pretty much all know and care about their rights), and we didn’t want to show you ads that tell you to oppose gay marriage or be scared of gay people back when Prop 8 was kicking around. But we didn’t really have much of a choice – we can’t censor the ads on our sites, and there are no other advertisers that work for us at our current level of sophistication and readership.

The people that control the media, whom Jon Stewart opposes, make us show them, so we have to. Thankfully, our mandatory political advertisers don’t really care if we insult them to their faces; we’re not important enough. So, when a particularly pernicious issue comes up, we come out and say on the site – “Hey guys, we’re sorry about that one, don’t pay attention to it, those people are jerks” and that makes me a little more comfortable with the whole rotten business.

Still, every time I see another one of those goddamned push polls on the site I grind another layer of enamel off my molars.

But yeah, I understand why Jon Stewart hates this kind of media, but I don’t think this rally is really going to do much to stop it, or even slow it down. And I don’t think that’s why we all gathered on the mall in Washington, either.

A Magical Gathering

And by all, I mean at least 200,000 people. Funny story – Fox News went with an estimate of 60,000, but Fox’s own DC affiliate quoted at least 200,000 just based on the excess DC Metro traffic alone. If it were only 60,000 people, they each must have ridden the Metro at the Mall 8 times on Saturday. DC residents I talked to all confirmed that the attendance at this rally crushed attendance at Glen Beck’s rally.

Blocks of DC were packed with people all around the event. Comedy Central’s biggest mistake was underestimating the size of the crowd — the sound systems were woefully inadequate. A lot of the people there couldn’t hear much of what was said by the performers, or any of the musical guests, and “Louder! Louder!” was the most common chant in the crowd – you could hear it move around the rally as the limited speed of sound created phasing problems over the long distances involved. The Comedy Central website supposedly got hit by 4 million requests for the stream when it started.

But yeah, as somebody who was there, I can tell you this thing was a really big deal that touched the lives of a lot of people.

But focusing on that is the kind of sensationalism Stewart decries, so I’ll move on.

Hard times, not end times

The important takeaway is that the money finds its way downhill, and since there neither the political will for a strong federal government authority to police and counterbalance abuses, nor a framework for doing so that works within the constitution, nor an economically efficient model that does things any differently short of state-controlled media paired with a sovereign wealth fund and all that jazz — and since this coalition now controls the Supreme Court, is able to block any congressional or presidential priority it chooses to block through influence on both sides of the political aisle, is about to take more formal control of Congress (after which they will promptly nudge the Tea Parties that got them there out of meaningful policymaking circles), and will probably take control of the Presidency in 2012 due to nigh-limitless unregulated resources in an unprecedented surge in legal public corruption —

Well, because of all these things, the current dynamic with the press is probably going to keep working this way for a while. But, as Stewart said, “These are hard times, not end times.”

This problem isn’t really that urgent or that bad. It’s a meaningful problem, to be sure, but this wasn’t just him marshalling opposition to it. There is time. And hey, maybe it’s an economic or social trend that will be with us for a while. There is more you can do in relation to a problem than solve it. Reframing it and understanding it in new ways can be a powerful thing.

As far as I can tell, there is no totalitarian regime knocking down Jon Stewart’s door and making him stop. He just had an enormous show of force on the steps of the Capitol. The opposition Stewart presents isn’t really that threatening to the social order, and the social order doesn’t really threaten Stewart that much. That’s why we can all afford to be sane, and why it’s important to divorce this rally from other shows of force. It is such habit to think of these political events as thrusts in the direction of an immediate goal – this was an act of creation and an act of patience.

While it may appear as if Stewart is casting off the robe of satirist and becoming a pundit himself, he’s a still a satirist speaking truth to power. Maybe the ideas will germinate and create some sort of adjustment in attitudes or change down the line. That’s of course not what a satirist is, but it is a big part of what a satirist does — pursuing the idea, not the political objective. Acting as an artist first and a political person far afterward.

This is why, for example, some people still read “A Modest Proposal” in school (an essay by satirist Jonathan Swift about solving overpopulation and Malthusian poverty by eating babies), despite the fact that the explosive fecundity of the Irish is no longer a social problem of great perceived importance. It’s not just about what gets done around the issue – it’s about how we think about the issue.

And hey, really, the press isn’t that different from how it’s always worked. Stewart’s way of talking about it, his common sense approach and his attention to specificity, his particular take on journalistic integrity – these are rarer things that we might like to admit in this business. The popular press has long by one mechanism or another been controlled by wealthy private interests and used for the exercise of political power and corruption of the state. This is just the way they happen to be doing so now, and it’s just a little sad that we don’t get to exercise the willful ignorance of it that our parents and grandparents got to exercise. But hey, ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s just ignorance, right?

The information saturation and availability promoted by the Internet makes thinking about a lot of things in new ways not only possible, but necessary. The criticism Stewart is offering is of something that is perhaps newly apparent, but not new at its core, and structurally a big part of how media functions – Stewart himself is even part of it from time to time, which he appreciates and makes fun of, because he doesn’t take up the mantle of journalism that he so often accuses others of wearing falsely because he doesn’t want to be dishonest about something that is so important and elusive.

That’s a pretty complex relationship there — a lot of things Stewart is able to help us think about in how the dynamics of media play out these days. But yeah, it doesn’t solve the problem. The difference is how we think about it. When we choose to think about it – you know, when we have the time to think about it and are not like the mom with two kids in the car Stewart talks about who can’t really think about anything else right now.

Ad Absurdum

People wonder how this rally is appropriate for a comedian — is Jon Stewart no longer a comedian, but something else? Looking at the landscape of the problem and the absurdity of how he has approached talking about it, I come down very firmly on the side of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear being very much an art object and a comedic and satiric piece, and not a crossover political rally by a bunch of comedians.

It is absurd to rally 200,000 people on the national mall to a giant speech where you’re going to tell them to chill out and not worry too much. It’s absurd to get together a giant coalition to address a problem you don’t really think can be solved right away that’s very complex, to offer some platitudes and general principles around it but not use this giant group of people to do anything about it, and then have everybody go out drinking and to Halloween parties.

But absurdity serves a very important role in helping us think about and create meaning around problems. It helps us broaden our perspective around issues that are difficult to grasp. It’s like a Zen koan – that’s a great example of a concept that Western people generally grasp more easily by conceiving of it as foreign or exotic when really it’s quite common in their own culture – thinking about something that is incomprehensible in some way broadens your mind and makes it possible to think in a different way.

You don’t have to be serious while you’re doing it, and your end goal doesn’t have to be enlightenment. Pondering and articulating the absurdity of relationships and ways of thinking is an important mechanism in satire and social change in western societies as well. Pointing out the absurdity in a situation isn’t just about making fun of somebody or taking them down a peg. It’s about understanding complex relationships in a way that our usual discourse makes difficult.

By creating this rally, Stewart (and really everybody else involved in it, I’m speaking about his posse synechdochally), are challenging us to expand the way we think about discourse. But they also creatied a venue that the people attending the rally used to their own ends. And these ends were in many ways a lot more creative, insightful, complex and elucidating than the rally itself.

I’ll save some of that for my next entry, when I have more pictures compiled and can share the broader experience. For now, I’ll give you a bad picture of the poster I carried with me during the rally with my bad phone camera used poorly:

I’m not the world’s biggest Paul Krugman fan in the world (although his Nobel Prize winning economic work is awesome and legit, according to people I’ve talked to who know about that sort of thing – even if it doesn’t have much to do with the columns he writes for the New York Times), nor the biggest Shepard Fairey fan in the world, but I love a good “five percenter” joke (this one was probably more like one percent).

But I can’t really let any of this pass without mentioning the signs. The signs were so awesome – a big part of the entertainment of this event. A lot of them were political, but most of them weren’t – I’ve already conversed on Twitter with JessicaHusseinObama, or @vdaze, who made the “I LIKE ICE CREAM” sign:

And, I really loved how there were certain topics that seemed to be on a lot of people’s minds. One of the cool things about artistic events and festivals — and you could have easily thought of this whole event as a signmaking festival, as many people pointed out with signs that said such things as “GRAPHIC DESIGNERS FOR SANITY” or “I OWN STOCK IN A POSTER SUPPLY COMPANY” or the many “MY ARMS ARE GETTING TIRED” and “THIS IS A SIGN” signs. One topic that popped up on a few signs struck a chord with me:

Or

I saw the sign

Okay, this is getting way long, but I’ll write a little more about the signs. The signs at the rally were largely ironic or self-referential, and a lot of them were funny and unrelated to politics. In my opinion, the signs were a mutual statement of awareness of metadiscourse.

People were coming together to say, “Yes, you, like I, am trapped in a senseless mill of media misinformation guided by agendas that are obscure to the point where they sometimes seem totally random. Let’s acknowledge this without coming out and saying it, because if we come out and say it, we will be too verbose and nobody will listen to us.” The absurdity of the signs reflected the absurdity of political discourse, and showed that the people holding them were savvy enough or clever enough to either know directly or intuit that political propaganda is constructed and mostly the product of somebody else’s imagination.

The signs also tended to reflect the perspectives of individuals – what they care about, what they like, what they find funny – and showed just how alien to the immediate, sincere human experience it is to be consumed by a political agenda.

Compare, say, a sign that says “GOD HATES FAGS” to one that says “I LIKE ICE CREAM.” Putting aside for a moment the contexts of these signs, which one of these makes more sense for a person to be proclaiming on a sign? One of these signs reflects something the person knows for certain, cares about, and is involved in personally. That same sign also gives pleasure to the person holding it because that person wants to share this knowledge with others in a way that creates possibilities. One of them seems a lot more actionable than the other – one of the signs points to something that you can and probably want to really do something about once you’ve read the sign. One of these signs inspires you to do something you probably want to do too. I’ll let you pick which one you think it is for you – as for me, I’ve always prefered ice cream to the attitudes that celestial or omnipresent beings have for other people as a focus for spending my time.

I mean, I know people have a lot of different attitudes about stuff, granted. But ice cream is delicious.

Eh, who am I kidding – I just really like it when people say things that are true, especially when it’s unexpected. It’s the same spirit that inspired my “10 Easiest Things Dance Songs Ask of You” article – the secret thought that every time you see something said, it’s being said to you on purpose for a reason, as opposed to arbitrarily or to nobody or as a product of a cynical agenda divorced from individual experience.

The political points most commonly made of signs were hatred of Glen Beck, which I think was largely symbolic or motivated by rivalry, opposition to certain specific political positions of Christine O’Donnell (Boy, did she screw up when she spoke out against masturbation! It turns out that a lot of taxpaying voters really like to masturbate. Don’t try to take away harmless things that provide people with a great deal of pleasure in their lives; it’s bad politics.), and various caricatures of Sarah Palin, who at this point seems to have become a politicotainment figure somewhere between Carla Bruni and Lindsay Lohan.

One notable thing about these three people? Almost nobody at the rally was going to be in a position to vote for or against any of these people in an actual election any time soon. This event was much more about media and discourse than about party politics. People care about what is being said to them a great deal. It matters. Also – it’s not fair to locate it all in Washington – so often people speak of “Washington” as the center of politics, but as politics and media intertwine further and further, that location seems less and less relevant. Important yes, but not exclusively so.

Oh, and I’ll link to this video – I don’t think it’s necessarily a representative sample, but it gives you a general sense. This video also includes a reference to the coolest moment of the rally, which was when Yusuf Islam a.k.a. Cat Stevens made a rare and amazing performance playing “Peace Train” (it was really awesome – gave the crowd chills), but was interrupted by Ozzie Osbourne playing “Crazy Train” and then in turn the Ojays singing “Love Train.” A great medley for sure:

Actually, I’ll link to a home video of that sequence, because it was just that damned awesome, and because I think it’s important to shift the perspective a bit from the people who threw the rally to the people who participated in the crowd – that’s where a lot of the real action happened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PuEAV8saMo

Man, that moment where Steven Colbert interrupted Cat Stevens was intense. So in character, but you really had to have some guts to do that. And it was a hugely redemptive moment when everybody realized Ozzie Osbourne was out there. A real rush.

To Sum Up For Now

So, taking this away from Jon Stewart’s speech:

The goal here isn’t really to win. Jon Stewart has been fighting this battle in public for six years, the destruction wrought by it is obvious on both sides of the political aisle (see the recent CBS affiliate Alaskan scandal or anything done by Fox News ever), any thinking person who steps back from self-interest for half a minute has got to agree with him, and this situation of the crumbling, derelict, frenzied, hateful, captured press just keeps getting worse. For now, the trend seems inexorable. For now. Certainly not something that can be fixed by a rally.

But this rally wasn’t really about winning. Jon Stewart doesn’t need to win. He’s political, but he’s not a politician, he’s an artist. Anybody there could feel in the air that the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear wasn’t a political rally of the sort meant to whip everybody up into a frenzy and leverage some demagoguery to get some specific agenda item accomplished. I’d wager spare few people left that rally thinking, “Man, we sure have those guys on the ropes!”

Could Voltaire have comprehended the political affect of his writings over the scope of history? Of course not. Did Milton’s Areopagitica lead in an expedient way to a basic freedom of the dissemination of information? Of course not. Did Jefferson’s vaunted writings on liberty at the founding of the United States actually offer most of the people who lived in the United States the rights it held so essential? Of course not.

But I detest the idea that these things are worthless if they don’t accomplish what they are looking to accomplish right away – or if they are marked by hypocrisy, as Stewart is because his bills are ultimately paid by Viacom and doesn’t take upon himself the mantle of seriousness he criticizes others for not wearing. Despite all this, the writings still matter. The art objects still matter.

They help frame future ways of thinking. They give us hope for a new way of living – and not the kind of hope where the feeling matters but doesn’t come with anything actionable – like the kind of hope you get from watching Willow. The hope that a magical little person can overcome all odds and save a baby from a wicked witch in a magical land far away where nobody has to worry about paying an electric bill.

No, the kind of hope where you get something actionable that seems frustrating and futile until the moment it isn’t, even if that moment is a hundred years or two after the art object was created. The hope of a good idea.

The sense I got on the ground at the Rally to Restore Sanity is people left feeling relieved, not because we were making progress, not because the Tea Party (the universal villains of the rally, even if the Democrats were definitely not the heroes) was going to be diminished by it, but because the whole exercise made us all feel a little less crazy. It helped us in the critical and difficult at of thinking – of imagining what exactly the opposition to this frenzied press paradigm might look like – and making thinking easier is a very pleasurable thing.

And because it presented a liberating absurdity that helped us consider our world in new ways, while at the same time feeling confirmed in that consideration by the presence of so many of our countrymen and countrywomen (and a lot of Canadians too, for some reason. One fun poster I read said, “I Came All the Way from Toronto to Take My Country Back!”).

The rally was an artistic event that created meaning and context — an intellectual and cultural touchstone — for a subject that is complex, hard to talk about, and harder to cope with and internalize. It will be a long time, I’d wager, years if we’re lucky, decades if we’re not, before we find a way to make its values work in the world on a large-scale practical level. In the meantime, it can serve as a “teachable moment” for people who are a little lost in how to proceed.

In the meantime, things are not so bad that we cannot associate with one another, and there has been a powerful group identified here that has the potential for future action – and it’s tied in to a number of other organizations with a lot of social capital (the one I noticed everywhere were from reddit).

In the meantime, the big X factor is innovation in media. If people really do shift away from mainstream media outlets sufficiently, if news organizations keep shutting down or stripping away resources, maybe you’ll see an alternative model rise up in its place, and the press will have to adapt. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of the people at this rally are consumers and producers of alternative media – a lot of redditors, a lot of farkers, a lot of niche people who have their own sources of information. There are a lot of people for whom The Daily Show is the closest they watch to “news.”

I think the real action associated with Stewart’s philosophy will come as that paradigm comes into its own, because there is a massive group of people on board with it, and the market fundamentals seems such that it won’t be somebody like NBC or CBS leading the way.

But that’s just what I saw from 150 feet behind a row of vans the day before Halloween.