Well, now that it’s the middle of the afternoon on Monday, all the various pundits and bloggers have had their chance to weigh in on Saturday’s Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally in Washington, so here’s a bit of a bonus post from me with links to four different pieces I think you might want to read:
The Friendly Atheist blogger Hemant Mehta attended the event not in any formal/official way (mostly because he was unable to score a press badge), but his on-the-ground report is the best one I’ve read in terms of giving you an idea of what it was like to be there: crowded but friendly, nobody could see or hear anything on stage, and lots of side action among the crowd.
Writing for The Awl, Maria Bustillos not only got a press pass, but got some facetime with Arianna Huffington, who spewed the usual empty canned responses. This piece is worth reading because it tries to put Jon Stewart into the context of his own career, which is sometimes overlooked in favor of his “Daily Show” success. Bustillos really gets into the discussion of the breakdown between entertainment and politics in this piece, which is a critical gloss on the whole event.
Speaking of Arianna Huffington, HuffPo religion columnist Rabbi Sid Schwartz was also at the rally and confirms the difficulties that the crowd had seeing and hearing the on-stage action. his essay, though, focuses on the sense that many in the crowd seemed to share that somehow the rally was less than what they had hoped for. Many people were looking for a counterpoint to the Tea Party events that have gotten so much attentions, but the rally people seemed very determined to avoid any overt politicization, leaving people to either make it up on their own (witness all the signs we’ve seen posted all over the Internet), or to walk away somewhat disenchanted.
Which may have been exactly the point, writes Chris Hedges. By avoiding the appearances of being a leftie rally and keeping the “radical left” in the same camp as the “radical right” by invoking a “return to sanity”, the rally indulges the mainstream self-rationalization that “everybody is crazy but us”. Thus assuaged that by standing in a big crowd, not really able to see or hear some bands and some comedians, who didn’t really say anything important anyway, the “moderate majority” can feel better about themselves without actually doing much of anything. Given Schwartz’s palpable restlessness about the event, I’m very much inclined to agree with Hedges.
