I've been bothered by the Rally this weekend for a number of reasons. I like Stewart and Colbert. But they are satirists on The Comedy Channel and like the Fox Network comedian Beck's rally this to feels like a performance piece with people spending time and effort on Spectacle as diversion rather than working toward something with meaningful political content that might actually improve their lives.
As for the liberal politeness. That is reason enough for me to take the Phil Ochs position regarding liberals.
I'm not a liberal. I'm a radical. When some one calls me a name or hits me I don't whimper off and pout about them calling me a name. I hurl an insult right back. If someone hits me I hit them back.
I don't believe in god and Jesus is a common Latino name as far as I am concerned. Gandhi's game owes as much to the Nazis and Japanese destruction of the British military and Britain's ability to rule an Empire as it does to some sort of moral imperative.
Dr Martin Luther King's non-violence wouldn't have made half the civil rights gains had there not been the huge riots scaring people into passing civil rights legislation.
Scott McLemee
October 28, 2010
TO RESIDE in Washington, D.C., means occupying a front-row seat on life's rich pageant.
We get regular visits from the Tea Partiers, with their outrage, their guns and their imaginatively spelled signs. Earlier this month, amidst the many thousands of people attending the One Nation rally, a few hundred people in the Socialist Contingent marched with signs demanding higher taxes for the rich and an end to the wars. (Full disclosure: I was part of this, and joined in chanting, "We're gonna make Glenn Beck cry!") And each year, shortly before Halloween, the drag queens turn out in force to strut their stuff on 17th Street--as if to show that Monica Lewinsky is alive and well, albeit with a hint of stubble.
The Klan comes to town every so often. Then the police get a lot of overtime. Other than that, these gatherings tend to be peaceable enough. And so one would expect with this coming weekend's gathering, convened by Comedy Central's faux news anchors Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert--particularly since it's being promoted as a rally for the militantly moderate.
Blaming the left and the right equally for the shabby state of American political discourse, its goal is, in the words of Stewart, to "take it down a notch for America." The default response a longtime DCer will be, if anything, even more non-ideological: "Thank you for your tourism dollars. Now please go home."
But while bracing for the influx of visitors (this is a city, after all, where the mass transit system occasionally doesn't break down), I've been trying to think about the strangeness of this event. It is not so much a political protest as a parody of a political protest. Yet it will nonetheless serve partisan ends. The Democratic slogan for this election season might as well have been, "Don't blame us, we've never actually done anything!" which has not exactly galvanized the youth vote.
The Democrats are, of course, a predominantly centrist party (delirious fantasies about Obama as follower of Franz Fanon notwithstanding). So it's not hard to tell which electoral base will be mobilized by the opportunity to consume well-produced comic infotainment in the nation's capitol.
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