Embrace the insanity

As I watched Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity over fall break, I had a premonition of this week’s election results. After several hours of tomfoolery and performances by mid-grade rockers, I knew analysts’ predictions would come true, from the gains the Republicans made in the Senate to their new dominance in the House. In his recent column, "The trouble with restoring sanity", Sam Klug correctly pointed out one of the rally’s main weaknesses: it emphasizes a degree of moderation that is impossible in today’s political climate. Especially in light of the midterm elections, I take my critique a step further.

The message of the rally was to utterly discredit the media as a bunch of alarmist fear-mongers incapable of delivering important messages to the American people. Yes, this is the foundation of “The Daily Show,” which gets its material from humorous cherry-picked segments from the 24-hour television news cycle. But here, Stewart has glossed over the profound history of journalism serving as America’s nervous system. In typical “Daily Show” fashion, the rally showed clips of news anchors exhorting the dangers of everything from bombing to bedbugs. Of course, Stewart has a point—networks will go to any means to retain viewers’ attention.

But consider, for example, if we had dismissed reporting on the Watergate scandal or the horrors of the Vietnam War as alarmism propagated by media in hyperdrive, more interested in fearmongering than doing its job. President Nixon may not have been impeached or removed from office, and our country may have been entrenched in a bloody, hopeless war for even longer than it was. If we followed Stewart’s advice, we would choose to ignore real threats of danger—and America is in danger now—as ridiculous and overblown. This comatose state of indifference is what Stewart defines as “sanity.”

Who is a “sane” person, according to his definition? The comedian gave us some clues in his short exposition speech near the end. A “sane” person sees through accusations of extremism on both sides of the aisle, from Republicans calling Obama a communist to Democrats claiming that the Tea Partiers are racists and xenophobes. A “sane” person recognizes that both parties have their points, but that the ultimate goal should be collaboration. What I think is that these “sane” people, most of whom are Democrats, are the ones to blame for the Republican victory.

The Stewart/Colbert Rally was a response to Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor, which was effective precisely because it eschewed this limp sort of “sanity.” Shockingly, it took place on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I watched it on YouTube. The cameraman interviewed several attendees, and not a single one of them was unsure why he was there. The interviewees answered his questions with a litany of stock words and phrases: “We’re here to take back America” from the communists, socialists, terrorists, big government, the liberal media, Muslims, gays, elitists, Washington insiders, Chinese, Arabs—and “the blacks don’t own this day.” It is all right there. So how do you expect a journalist to cover this rally, or the statements by Tea Party favorites who are now in office, without using certain words? That assignment sounds more like a warm-up game in acting class than honest political reporting.

As much as I disagree with Glenn Beck, I have to stand back and admire his ability to rivet his group of followers, to inspire them to act. Headline after headline in the New York Times reported that Republicans monopolized all the excitement in this race, and that the Democrats could only play defense. The Rally to Restore Sanity is symptomatic of the crucial mistake made by liberals in this country: to confuse open-mindedness with lack of conviction. Mired in this confusion, Stewart and Colbert wasted the time of hundreds of thousands of liberals and Democrats who had hoped to rally, full of conviction, around their cause.

I do not propose that the Democrats subscribe to the rigid dogmatism at work in the Rally to Restore Honor. Rather, they should stop walking on eggshells in an effort to appear magnanimous. Apathy right now, as a recent Times editorial puts it, is young people and Democrats “sitting on their hands...voting for the Republicans, none of whom will protect these voters’ interests.” And apathy is not the same as sanity. When Jon Stewart discredits the media in a serious way, beyond the limits of a comedy show, he does us a disservice: He puts us at a dangerous distance from any source of truth, which is strangely dissonant with his criticism of the Bush administration’s attempts to undermine journalism. But from here, we are left in a void where any effort to distinguish good ideas from bad ones is partisan extremism—even “insanity.”

Amanda Gutterman is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in English. The Far Side of the Familiar runs alternate Wednesdays.