Members of the Colbert Nation and rabid Daily Show groupies rallied together at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 30 to “Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” The celebrity-studded spectacle was the faux liberal media’s response to Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally held in late August.
However, there’s been plenty of media speculation over whether the counter-rally—led by TV personalities and political satirists Stephen Colbert and John Stewart—actually restored anything. But since many of those media outlets failed to cover the rally, it’s difficult to take their soliloquizing seriously.
Many mainstream news networks and organizations prohibited employees from attending the rally: NPR, which Stephen Colbert joked “would be a shame for people to think was a liberal news station;” the Washington Post; the Associated Press; NBC; and The New York Times.
But fear not, faithful readers, the Sun chose to buck the trend set by those bastions of newsgathering and sent intrepid intern Henry Houston back East to witness the (in)sanity first-hand.
Here’s Houston’s take on the rally:
Mr. Houston goes to Washington
To kick off the rally, Stewart and Colbert held competing award shows, which recognized the efforts of hard-hitting journalists, such as Anderson Cooper, host of Anderson Cooper 360. Well, the award didn’t directly go to him. Instead, Colbert honored Cooper’s tight, black shirt. In addition, the liberal leaning network, MSNBC, which is meant to combat the more conservative Fox News, was also targeted since it has the same tendencies as the latter—just a different political stance.
The award to the Cooper shirt set the mood for the rally, which attracted myriad visitors who filled the National Mall. There still hasn’t been a confirmed number of rally attendees, but CBS counted about 215,000, and there were enough people to crash the phone networks.
The only thing known for sure was thanks to the duo from the TV show Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, and a seismologist. The two were performing some scientific tests before the rally officially began, aiming to discover just how large the audience was. For one of the tests, they asked everyone to jump at the same time. After a couple of jumps, the seismologist concluded that the “shake” was one hundred times bigger than a small car crashing into a brick wall.
Although comedy was the theme of the day, the musical acts that performed at the rally could be a seen as a symbol of everyone getting along, despite their differences. The event kicked off with the snare drum of The Roots, the rally’s headlining band; ?uestlove and, later, John Legend came onstage to join the band to play a few songs together. Other entertainers included Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow, who performed a new song in front of a green-screened TI.
“I think it’s ironic that I’m the one playing the serious song,” Rock said as he sat down at an electric piano. The song, which Stewart mentioned was perfect for the event, was about how everything is polarized and dragging him around. But that wasn’t the only surprise when it came to musical performances—and two extremes coming together.
Stewart introduced a musical guest formerly known as Cat Stevens; he now goes by Yusuf Islam. Islam, who was greeted by an audience with dropped jaws, began strumming his guitar with enough elegance to make Queen Elizabeth’s English sound vulgar. He started singing his classic “Peace Train.” Within seconds, an angry Stephen Colbert came out.
“No, no,” he said, interrupting the song and getting more boos than a ghost convention. “I don’t wanna get on that train. No way!”
Colbert wanted to board a different train, the conductor of which soon emerged.
“All aboard!” yelled Ozzy Osbourne, as The Roots began hammering out “Crazy Train.” While Ozzy sang his trademark song, Stewart stood by, shaking his head in disbelief that his comrade would do such a thing. Islam held his guitar, staring at Ozzy, and Colbert danced around. It wasn’t too long before Stewart halted the crazy train, asking Colbert why he would board something “going off the tracks.” Stewart motioned for Islam to start playing again; Colbert pushed Ozzy to keep singing “Crazy Train.”
Then Ozzy and Islam stopped and walked off-stage with arms around each other.
“Do you know how much work I went through to get Yusuf?” Stewart asked Colbert. Colbert, too, mentioned the lengths he went to in obtaining the Prince of Darkness.
Now they were without a band and a train. What other train was available?
The O’Jays had an answer. They arrived, singing about hopping on the love train, proving that two people with contrasting beliefs—Stewart’s rationalism and Colbert’s hard-nosed conservatism modeled after papa O’Reilly—can come together to accomplish good.
Not long after, an actual debate of sorts emerged. The debate took the place of Stewart’s “planned” keynote speech and was a battle of fear versus rationalism. The face-off began with Stewart telling Colbert bottled water contains corbomite, a deadly poison that will kill him. Colbert was worried because he drank a bottled water backstage, so he proceeded to drink water—from a bottle—to flush the chemical out of his system. The topic then changed to how Muslims are, as a whole, responsible for terrorism, which prompted more fear from Colbert. That’s when basketball legend Kareem Abdul Jabar came on stage.
The topic then changed to robots, which Colbert also fears. Of course, what better representative of ’bots than the lovable R2-D2 to make Colbert think twice about his generalization? The two chatted, and the world’s favorite droid successfully persuaded Colbert against assuming all robots are evil.
But Colbert’s brief moment of sanity came to an end when he played clips from television, all of which talked about threats to mankind—spanning everything from bedbugs to flip-flops.
Stewart rebutted by holding up a remote. “I took this from my hotel,” he said, telling the audience to change the channel from 24-hour news programs.
Colbert had something else up his sleeve; he showed another clip, which said hotel remotes foster a dangerous amount of bacteria and germs. And Colbert brought his secret weapon: a large puppet version of himself. Colbert then assumed victory of the debate, and declared that Stewart was now dead.
“No, I’m not,” Stewart said.
Daily Show correspondent John Oliver came onstage in a Peter Pan uniform. He told the audience they must revive Stewart from his death, despite retorts from the alleged deceased.
“Clap your hands,” Oliver asked the audience. To no avail, though, for Colbert stood alongside his puppet of fear. “Do something! Do a jig, do a ham-shank!” Oliver pleaded. It took screaming and hand-clapping to revive the fallen Stewart and to overthrow the coup d’sanity.
Toward the end of the rally, Stewart took a moment to bring forth a serious matter: the media.
“We live in hard times, not end times, and we can have animus without being enemies,” he told the audience. “But unfortunately, the two are broken. The country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence is making solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen, or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.”
At the end of the rally, all of the musical acts, guests, Daily Show correspondents, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart came on stage to sing one last song together—after Tony Bennett sang “God Bless America.”
During Stewart’s goodbye to the audience, he claimed, “The news is America’s immune system. If it overreacts to everything, then it makes us look like we are sicker than we really are.”
The audience dispersed and flooded the streets of D.C., waving signs and clad in costumes, reminding the city of their presence—if it even needed such a reminder. It was only a few hours since the metro rail was packed with the rally-goers, nearly bringing D.C. traffic to a standstill. These protesters, who outnumbered attendees at Glenn Beck’s “Rally to Restore Honor” and the early-October rally “One Nation Working Together,” established themselves as a group of Americans who have grown weary of party politics, a system where one party needs a complete majority to accomplish anything. The “silent majority” finally spoke out, but wanted to tell a joke first.
Intern Henry Houston can be contacted at intern@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2010.