Crazy Reasonable: Jon Stewart’s Rally
Crazy Reasonable: Jon Stewart’s Rally
Sarah Leonard: Crazy Reasonable – Jon Stewart’s Rally
This weekend I rode the zeitgeist all the way to the ?Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,? the Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert October surprise. Stepping onto the Mall was like entering a Saturday Night Live sketch about American apathy; some people held signs begging for civility, but most proclaimed an enthusiastic irony: ?CAPITAL LETTERS MEAN I?M SERIOUS,? ?Could be!,? ?anyone for Scrabble later?? Much like the Obama campaign, it was a transitory community of common entertainment, making no demands beyond the event itself. This was a rally about a sensibility, but not about a politics.
The rally predictably blamed Left and Right equally for being too loud, too aggressive, too dumb on television. It?s the same ?fair and balanced? analysis that Jon Stewart has spent years effectively mocking. He told the crowd that we shouldn?t call liberals Marxists, and we shouldn?t call Tea Party adherents racist. Which was funny, because I?m pretty sure Obama is not a revolutionary (although for all we know he experimented with historical materialism as an undergraduate), but I?m damn sure that the Senate candidate who ran this ad is racist. Just look at those Mexicans run! In order to help us destroy the false Left-Right dichotomy, Stewart and Colbert sang a chipper tune with verses satirizing each side. We heard that liberals like lattes, and conservatives like guns?suggesting that the existing poles in the country revolve around coffee preferences, and therefore need not be subject to particularly strong debate. There was bipartisan agreement in the chorus: ?We?re the greatest, strongest, country in the world, the greatest, strongest country in the world.? All together now for Uncle Sam! Listening to 300,000 people sing this particular chorus was creepy, since you couldn?t quite tell if it was a joke. (The constantly shifting irony line would preempt serious politics all afternoon.) We may have no say in our own government and be scared of our newscasters, but aren?t we still great?
At any rate, the faux-even-handedness was hardly the worst of it. As indicated by the consumer-choice approach to defining Left and Right, Stewart?s rally basically dealt with questions of style and preference. He was incensed by how much people on television yell when what we need is reasonable compromise. What he suggested over and over again by asking only for good manners, is that there is nothing important enough to really fight for. I prefer lattes, you prefer hunting; I prefer not launching preemptive wars that destroy thousands of lives, but hey, maybe you?re into that. I?m sure we can meet somewhere in the middle.
The media problem that he might have addressed is not volume, but depth. News has become entertainment for reasons other than Keith Olbermann?s natural feistiness. News, of course, tends toward entertainment under massive corporate ownership, where hosts are hired and fired based on their ratings, and not their journalistic integrity. A discussion of this particular problem might actually have empowered the audience. Once you set some criteria for what makes bad media (owned purely by profit-seekers), you can learn how to pick good media (perhaps independently owned). But the wholesale discrediting of media in general, without the least discussion of why it has turned to infotainment, is to tell an audience of 300,000 that there?s no information that one can count on, and therefore no rational basis for action. If the next time we hear about war crimes committed by our military our only answer is, ?Could be!,? we?re going to be in real trouble. Amidst the enthusiasm for reasonableness, there could be no suggestion that common-sense desires (a free media) might require rather radical changes, and that not making any substantial changes will continue to support the crazy shoutfest.
If anything, this rally was dedicated to encouraging neighborliness among the powerless, rather than offering any basis to challenge the powers that be. This attitude was nicely encapsulated by the Kid Rock/Sheryl Crow horror-duet with the chorus, ?the least I can do is care.? True! But Americans don?t need condescending lessons in loving thy neighbor. I could be misjudging, but too few block parties is probably not the specter haunting America. No one talked about truly malevolent forces. Instead, the rally bestowed on participants a genuine sense of superiority toward people who care about anything enough to fight for it, and a bizarre attitude that if we just talk in inside voices, massive structural problems in America will drift away on the breeze.
The rally might well have been better if Stewart had dropped his earnest plea for gentility and followed one sign hovering above the crowd: ?only the jesters dare speak the truth.?
