Scenes from the Rally to Restore Sanity

I suppose it is indicative of the current movements in American political thought that in a year that the Tea Party’s Rally to Restore Honor and the organized left’s One Nation Rally drew crowds of no more than tens of thousands, a decidedly postmodern demonstration could usher a crowd as great as 6 billion people. Okay... in reality it was more like 250,000 – but the point is that the largest demonstration to march upon Washington in recent memory was not pushing for Congress to pass a certain piece of legislation or for the White House to end a certain war, it did not seem to have any tangible agenda in the proper sense of the word beyond the civilization of our nation’s political discourse.

To be honest, I was never able to get close enough to the stage to see exactly what was going on. But that didn’t matter – like at a Phish festival, the multitude of the audience was just as much if not more of an attraction as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's three-ring circus on center stage. It was an interesting bunch of mostly urban hipsters but also yuppies, hippies and bourgeois squares of all shades and hues and faiths and sexual orientations united by the fact that we are all so appalled by the lack of quality news programming on mainstream television that we have to resort to Comedy Central for our information on current events.

The Rally to Restore Sanity served as a celebration of blue state values; namely, respect for Science and Objective Reality, skepticism of Dogma and Ideology, and faith in mankind’s ability to evaluate arguments with the power of Reason. When the culture of college-educated professionals who develop their opinions from newspapers, policy journals and non-fiction books is withstanding an onslaught of philistinism and bigotry masquerading as a coherent political theory, eventually push comes to shove and someone has to hold the world's greatest flash mob of participatory absurdist theater.

To the barricades!!!