I saw the sign
Okay, this is getting way long, but I’ll write a little more about the signs. The signs at the rally were largely ironic or self-referential, and a lot of them were funny and unrelated to politics. In my opinion, the signs were a mutual statement of awareness of metadiscourse.
People were coming together to say, “Yes, you, like I, am trapped in a senseless mill of media misinformation guided by agendas that are obscure to the point where they sometimes seem totally random. Let’s acknowledge this without coming out and saying it, because if we come out and say it, we will be too verbose and nobody will listen to us.” The absurdity of the signs reflected the absurdity of political discourse, and showed that the people holding them were savvy enough or clever enough to either know directly or intuit that political propaganda is constructed and mostly the product of somebody else’s imagination.
The signs also tended to reflect the perspectives of individuals – what they care about, what they like, what they find funny – and showed just how alien to the immediate, sincere human experience it is to be consumed by a political agenda.
Compare, say, a sign that says “GOD HATES FAGS” to one that says “I LIKE ICE CREAM.” Putting aside for a moment the contexts of these signs, which one of these makes more sense for a person to be proclaiming on a sign? One of these signs reflects something the person knows for certain, cares about, and is involved in personally. That same sign also gives pleasure to the person holding it because that person wants to share this knowledge with others in a way that creates possibilities. One of them seems a lot more actionable than the other – one of the signs points to something that you can and probably want to really do something about once you’ve read the sign. One of these signs inspires you to do something you probably want to do too. I’ll let you pick which one you think it is for you – as for me, I’ve always prefered ice cream to the attitudes that celestial or omnipresent beings have for other people as a focus for spending my time.
I mean, I know people have a lot of different attitudes about stuff, granted. But ice cream is delicious.
Eh, who am I kidding – I just really like it when people say things that are true, especially when it’s unexpected. It’s the same spirit that inspired my “10 Easiest Things Dance Songs Ask of You” article – the secret thought that every time you see something said, it’s being said to you on purpose for a reason, as opposed to arbitrarily or to nobody or as a product of a cynical agenda divorced from individual experience.
The political points most commonly made of signs were hatred of Glen Beck, which I think was largely symbolic or motivated by rivalry, opposition to certain specific political positions of Christine O’Donnell (Boy, did she screw up when she spoke out against masturbation! It turns out that a lot of taxpaying voters really like to masturbate. Don’t try to take away harmless things that provide people with a great deal of pleasure in their lives; it’s bad politics.), and various caricatures of Sarah Palin, who at this point seems to have become a politicotainment figure somewhere between Carla Bruni and Lindsay Lohan.
One notable thing about these three people? Almost nobody at the rally was going to be in a position to vote for or against any of these people in an actual election any time soon. This event was much more about media and discourse than about party politics. People care about what is being said to them a great deal. It matters. Also – it’s not fair to locate it all in Washington – so often people speak of “Washington” as the center of politics, but as politics and media intertwine further and further, that location seems less and less relevant. Important yes, but not exclusively so.
Oh, and I’ll link to this video – I don’t think it’s necessarily a representative sample, but it gives you a general sense. This video also includes a reference to the coolest moment of the rally, which was when Yusuf Islam a.k.a. Cat Stevens made a rare and amazing performance playing “Peace Train” (it was really awesome – gave the crowd chills), but was interrupted by Ozzie Osbourne playing “Crazy Train” and then in turn the Ojays singing “Love Train.” A great medley for sure:
Actually, I’ll link to a home video of that sequence, because it was just that damned awesome, and because I think it’s important to shift the perspective a bit from the people who threw the rally to the people who participated in the crowd – that’s where a lot of the real action happened.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PuEAV8saMo
Man, that moment where Steven Colbert interrupted Cat Stevens was intense. So in character, but you really had to have some guts to do that. And it was a hugely redemptive moment when everybody realized Ozzie Osbourne was out there. A real rush.
To Sum Up For Now
So, taking this away from Jon Stewart’s speech:
The goal here isn’t really to win. Jon Stewart has been fighting this battle in public for six years, the destruction wrought by it is obvious on both sides of the political aisle (see the recent CBS affiliate Alaskan scandal or anything done by Fox News ever), any thinking person who steps back from self-interest for half a minute has got to agree with him, and this situation of the crumbling, derelict, frenzied, hateful, captured press just keeps getting worse. For now, the trend seems inexorable. For now. Certainly not something that can be fixed by a rally.
But this rally wasn’t really about winning. Jon Stewart doesn’t need to win. He’s political, but he’s not a politician, he’s an artist. Anybody there could feel in the air that the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear wasn’t a political rally of the sort meant to whip everybody up into a frenzy and leverage some demagoguery to get some specific agenda item accomplished. I’d wager spare few people left that rally thinking, “Man, we sure have those guys on the ropes!”
Could Voltaire have comprehended the political affect of his writings over the scope of history? Of course not. Did Milton’s Areopagitica lead in an expedient way to a basic freedom of the dissemination of information? Of course not. Did Jefferson’s vaunted writings on liberty at the founding of the United States actually offer most of the people who lived in the United States the rights it held so essential? Of course not.
But I detest the idea that these things are worthless if they don’t accomplish what they are looking to accomplish right away – or if they are marked by hypocrisy, as Stewart is because his bills are ultimately paid by Viacom and doesn’t take upon himself the mantle of seriousness he criticizes others for not wearing. Despite all this, the writings still matter. The art objects still matter.
HOPE
They help frame future ways of thinking. They give us hope for a new way of living – and not the kind of hope where the feeling matters but doesn’t come with anything actionable – like the kind of hope you get from watching Willow. The hope that a magical little person can overcome all odds and save a baby from a wicked witch in a magical land far away where nobody has to worry about paying an electric bill.
No, the kind of hope where you get something actionable that seems frustrating and futile until the moment it isn’t, even if that moment is a hundred years or two after the art object was created. The hope of a good idea.
The sense I got on the ground at the Rally to Restore Sanity is people left feeling relieved, not because we were making progress, not because the Tea Party (the universal villains of the rally, even if the Democrats were definitely not the heroes) was going to be diminished by it, but because the whole exercise made us all feel a little less crazy. It helped us in the critical and difficult at of thinking – of imagining what exactly the opposition to this frenzied press paradigm might look like – and making thinking easier is a very pleasurable thing.
And because it presented a liberating absurdity that helped us consider our world in new ways, while at the same time feeling confirmed in that consideration by the presence of so many of our countrymen and countrywomen (and a lot of Canadians too, for some reason. One fun poster I read said, “I Came All the Way from Toronto to Take My Country Back!”).
The rally was an artistic event that created meaning and context — an intellectual and cultural touchstone — for a subject that is complex, hard to talk about, and harder to cope with and internalize. It will be a long time, I’d wager, years if we’re lucky, decades if we’re not, before we find a way to make its values work in the world on a large-scale practical level. In the meantime, it can serve as a “teachable moment” for people who are a little lost in how to proceed.
In the meantime, things are not so bad that we cannot associate with one another, and there has been a powerful group identified here that has the potential for future action – and it’s tied in to a number of other organizations with a lot of social capital (the one I noticed everywhere were from reddit).
In the meantime, the big X factor is innovation in media. If people really do shift away from mainstream media outlets sufficiently, if news organizations keep shutting down or stripping away resources, maybe you’ll see an alternative model rise up in its place, and the press will have to adapt. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of the people at this rally are consumers and producers of alternative media – a lot of redditors, a lot of farkers, a lot of niche people who have their own sources of information. There are a lot of people for whom The Daily Show is the closest they watch to “news.”
I think the real action associated with Stewart’s philosophy will come as that paradigm comes into its own, because there is a massive group of people on board with it, and the market fundamentals seems such that it won’t be somebody like NBC or CBS leading the way.
But that’s just what I saw from 150 feet behind a row of vans the day before Halloween.
Tomorrow’s going to be a pretty epic day for ‘Merica.
And hey, really, the press isn’t that different from how it’s always worked.
You say this, but you spend the bulk of the article arguing against it. Which is where I make my chief objection. You talk about “dereliction of duty” and “pervasive malice and corruption” in the press. From this, I’d get the impression that journalism in the early 21st century in America is somehow distinctly different – in tone or motive – than journalism in the 20th, 19th or 18th centuries. None of my (admittedly cursory) knowledge of American history suggests that that’s the case.
The 24-hour news stream has changed the volume of journalism, perhaps. And when you crank the volume up high enough, even Vivaldi gets ugly. But I don’t know that you make the case that America has entered a New Era of Irresponsible Reporting. And I don’t think Stewart has made the case, either.
Yeah, it isn’t really that clear-cut. Certainly we can see developments taht happen in real time that show things getting worse than they might otherwise be. But it’s unclear how much of this is actually new and how much of it is just having a greater understanding of what was always there.
One of the important distinctions is that, even if the overall function, the high-level view, has similarities, the methodology is DEFINITELY new.
Like, Fox News is run by a Nixon strategist who has multiple presidential candidates directly on his payroll and shills for fundraisers during its news broadcasts. If GE has historically influenced NBC News to serve its interests, it didn’t do so in this manner – maybe calls were made that killed stories, maybe producers and executives had conflicts of interest.
And to the extent that news reports were stilted or falsified in the past, it seems from memory at least that they were done in a more consistent manner that paid more deference to an idea of a correspondence theory of truth – but again, cognitive dissonance may be playing a role there. It’s hard to say.
But it was unacceptable until very recently to claim on a major TV news outlet that the President of the United States is an enemy sleeper agent conspiring to conduct paramilitary attacks on his own people, which is fairly common in the whole “terrorist-question-mark” discourse.
So something has definitely changed. The money situation is certainly very bad — individual corporations didn’t used to have the political clout to run campaigns that changed state constitutions (consider the hysterical misinformation around this summer’s California Prop 16, which was all funded by one company through a series of intermediaries and heavily advertised through media outlets that didn’t balk at the rampant misinformation).
Things on par with the Watergate scandal are at this point fairly commonplace, because the technology has made it a lot easier to do things like make enemies lists, spy on political enemies, record clandestine communications and funnel money in and out of slush funds – and the more widely proliferation of information has made “cover ups” business as usual, to the point where it is less common for something to _not_ be covered up by a vaguely aligned private political organization than for it to be so.
It isn’t clear exactly what or to what extent things have changed. One of the things the Bush administration worked very hard at doing was preventing people from finding out by classifying lots and lots of documents that would otherwise be public. We won’t really know until long after a lot of the people currently involved are dead – so it’s probably a project for our children and grandchildren.
But to say that you have to demonstrate how things have changed exactly in order to sound a call about it is setting too high a bar — this isn’t a logical argument where things must be proved, we’re not prosecuting anybody — it’s a cultural argument where things must be framed and articulated and ideas must catch on.
If you don’t think the economics of the media work this way, then great. Try to change it and see if it works. Work within a different model – try to run a news station and never invite on somebody from a think tank as a special “analyst” to deliver fabricated hysteria. The economics of the business get very difficult, but I have no proof you can’t do it.
And yeah, one of things we all owe it to ourselves to consider is that 19th century American history in particular is _really_ shady. A whole lot of stuff happened then during the conquest and economic development of the North American continent that would not pass muster today. A lot of bad stuff went down that informed a lot of policies that made things better and are now being dismantled because people have forgotten history.
But yeah, there are cycles that span hundreds of years, and considering a return to a certain point in a cycle as both something new and more of the same simultaneously is reasonable from a cultural perspective, depending on what you’re talking about and why.
Like, Fox News is run by a Nixon strategist who has multiple presidential candidates directly on his payroll and shills for fundraisers during its news broadcasts. If GE has historically influenced NBC News to serve its interests, it didn’t do so in this manner – maybe calls were made that killed stories, maybe producers and executives had conflicts of interest.
Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst started a war between the U.S. and Spain. Put anyone at the head of a giant corporation that makes its money off of “copies sold” or “viewers tuned in” and I am not convinced the results will be different.
it was unacceptable until very recently to claim on a major TV news outlet that the President of the United States is an enemy sleeper agent conspiring to conduct paramilitary attacks on his own people, which is fairly common in the whole “terrorist-question-mark” discourse.
Sure, because 24 hour cable news is very recent. You should see some of the slurs that Adams and Jefferson lobbied at each other – in the press, not just cheap pamphlets – when running for President.
The money situation is certainly very bad — individual corporations didn’t used to have the political clout to run campaigns that changed state constitutions
First, if you’re referring to the Citizens United ruling as the “didn’t used to” watershed, then (A) has the ability of well-connected corporations to funnel money to candidates ever really, I mean really, been that curtailed? and (B) given the case in question, which was whether or not a small group of private citizens had the First Amendment right to release an unflattering documentary of Hillary Clinton, the SCOTUS decision was (to my civil liberty loving eyes) unambiguously the right call. As in, why is it even debatable? “Corporations” aren’t just fat cats in boardrooms. The ACLU has been hindered from running ads by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.
If Citizens United was the last thing standing between massive corporate control of elections and a free America, then that means campaign finance laws were drafted incorrectly to begin with.
to say that you have to demonstrate how things have changed exactly in order to sound a call about it is setting too high a bar — this isn’t a logical argument where things must be proved, we’re not prosecuting anybody — it’s a cultural argument where things must be framed and articulated and ideas must catch on.
That’s not how I meant it; I apologize for framing it that way. My objection wasn’t that Stewart was making an insufficient case or that he was ascribing false charges to the mainstream media. My objection was that he was wrong.
If Stewart wants either a more civil media or a media more driven by a relentless search for truth than by a desire to champion an agenda, he doesn’t want a “return” to anything. He wants a sea change in human affairs. He wants a revolution akin to the early Christian fathers, or the Oneida communes, or human colonies on the Moon, only this time he wants it to work.
I’m all for it! And I mean that sincerely. But he needs to get his message straight first. Step one: stop working for Viacom.
I think that the issue with Citizens United isn’t the original case, with the Hilary Clinton video. The problem was that Chief Justice Roberts expanded the scope of the case to arguing whether to overturn Austin v Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v FEC. Also, I find the concept of corporate personhood ridiculous (and it might have been wrongly decided in the first place).
I tried to go to the rally on Saturday, but was completely stymied by the crowds. I go to the National Mall pretty regularly, and at least walk or run by most of the major events, and this thing was massive. Within seconds, I was surrounded by people 20 feet deep, and by the time I decided to just watch from home, it took 15 minutes to get back out to the street. (By contrast, you could safely and easily run through the periphery of both the Beck and labor rallies this fall with a small amount of people-dodging.)
Anyway, from my couch the main thrust of the rally was the modern analogy to a medieval morality play. Stewart personified “reason,” and Colbert “fear.” And Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was, well, Kareem Abdul-Jabar. (It seems especially appropriate, since after Airplane!, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s defining characteristic is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar-ness, for lack of a better term.)
Colbert was what we expect from Colbert (the character, not the performer), but I usually think of Stewart as being a commentator, not a character. Saturday put the lie to that – he’s a Nick Carraway or a Nathan Zuckerman, not a third-person narrator. As theater, it was interesting, and it definitely had a message, even if the message was simply “chill out.” Does sanity come from reason alone, or by works of reasonableness? I think Stewart is a Protestant in this regard; I wonder if the audience mistook him for a Catholic.
Part of me wishes I had made my way into the crowd a bit more – from the small piece I saw of the live event, the experience of attending was very different from watching it on TV. But I’m glad I saw both sides, even with the imperfect lens of the camera forcing my eyes on the stage, instead of the community attending.
You wrote “(It seems especially appropriate, since after Airplane!, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s defining characteristic is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar-ness, for lack of a better term.)”
I think you must have mistaken him for someone else.
Patrick Perez
I was getting psyched up because I thought Stewart was going to bring out Bruce Springsteen, but then it was Kid Rock and I was sad.
I’m still turning the Rally over in my head. I was at a Halloween party that night, and we were talking about it for most of the time. There were some epic signs, though, including some physics ones (I’m a physics grad student)!
I had exactly the same reaction to the Kid Rock intro. “I bet it’s Springsteen. It’s gotta be Springsteen. It’s totally Springsteen. . . . Bwaaaaa?”
Same here. I was particularly surprised to see it be Kid Rock, because I never saw his career evolve beyond being the “Bawitdaba” and “Cowboy” guy.
Also, with regards to the “Train” medley, I was disappointed to not see the band Train make an appearance. (Note: I was not actually disappointed by this.)
Additionally, as a Detroit Tigers fan, I was happy to see an Armando Galarraga appearance. You were robbed, Armando!
Clearly, I was approaching this more as a pop culture and entertainment event than some sort of political event. I was, and am, well aware that this rally wasn’t going to change anything, because this sort of thing never does, so the best anybody could hope for was for the event to be entertaining and if it had a good message that’s a nice bonus, even if it was thoroughly preaching to the choir.
I find it interesting that this post and the comments seem to focus on more examples of the problems with media from the conservative side. Fox News, for example, gets a lot of grief from liberals, who see it as the penultimate example of media bias. As someone who’s more conservative (though with a few places I step over the aisle), I have for many years considered a lot of the media to be biased, just in the other direction. Perhaps liberals just didn’t notice, since they agreed with it. I remember my first shocking feeling about 10 years ago when, after moving to the DC area, I started reading my first copy of the Washington Post. I was so surprised by the casual way very simple articles vilified conservative positions or candidates with no supporting facts to back it up and by the way the Post would spin an article that should have been factual into an argument supporting a liberal position.
So then I started wondering–is this newspaper just insanely biased, or did I just not notice my Utah paper’s bias, because I agreed with it? (To be honest, I think it’s a bit of both.) No, I don’t agree with everything said on Fox News, but I don’t think they’re the only news outlet spouting theories and political stances as fact. It’s just that they’re doing it in the opposite direction of the other outlets and the more outspoken liberals. Rather than actually encourage a dialog between the disparate political parties, though, this has simple spurred more firm clutching at one party’s ideals over another’s. Drives me absolutely batty.
Sadly, as you posit, I think that any call for people to stop being stupid, to actually think about things, to demand responsibility, isn’t going to work. I don’t know if people really don’t want those things, or if they’re too caught up in the maelstrom, or what, but I know very few people I can have a rational conversation about politics with. This includes both my liberal and conservative friends. I admit part of that might be my tendency to play devil’s advocate, but when people start spouting things like “Providing dinner through schools for inner city kids is just one step away from the State raising kids,” I just have to say something!
“The need for a free press isn’t diminished whether you prefer social policy to charity or the military to the State Department — it’s something the members of both parties should be interested in, and a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, where it has become a dominant strategy to destroy it that has resulted in a net negative for everybody.”
I agree with this so whole-heartedly!
“(The previous example, of course, relies on the extent to which knowing what is “actually happening” is possible, but seeing that I am a conservative in this scenario, I’m probably not going to invoke Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation while watching the news).”
Actually, just because you’re a conservative doesn’t mean you might not think about that. It’d just be if you weren’t an Overthinker. ;)
Anyway, interesting article! I’m still glad I didn’t go to the rally, ’cause that many people would probably have given me my first panic attack, but I am interested in this sort of dialog!
Typical media bias is not the issue that Stewart is most concerned about. The biggest problem today is the escalating use of Orwellian propaganda tactics by certain news media outlets for the sole purpose of creating fear and anger, e.g. going so far as to convince 40-50% of the members of an entire political party that the President wasn’t born in the US, despite absolute proof that he was (and not a shred of evidence to support any intelligent belief to the contrary).
This kind of irrational thinking by millions of people en masse can become extremely dangerous, and is a hell of a lot different than the “truth-depending-on-your-point-of-view” opinion politics to which we’ve become accustomed.
Notice how it’s only when we have a BLACK president that he has his very citizenship questioned? This kind of propaganda conveniently targets those whom already harbor a racial bias, and it is used to convince these people that the President is not “one of us”. It’s classic self vs. other psychology, and it’s the kind of thing that elicits the primal emotions because it represents a more primitive, irrational view of the world.
Those individuals propagating these kinds of scare tactics will simply tell whatever lies necessary to make people angry and/or fearful. The more outrageous the lie, the more afraid the people will become, and thus the more easily they can be manipulated. This has become virtually the entire playbook of an increasing number of political “personalities”, and it’s precisely how Goebbels described the Nazi propaganda tactics that worked so well in the 1930’s.
And once they gained power, they just labeled anyone who opposed their behavior as unpatriotic.
Sound familiar?