By Perry Crowe

(YBH) – So it’s a Red Dawn in America.  People have taken their government back!  The bums have been thrown out!  New bums, take your seats!

With a freshly minted mandate, the next class of congressmen and -women will sweep into office and recommence the legislative pissing contest that already has us knee deep in our own filth.  Unless everybody listens to Jon Stewart and helps those cars get into the Lincoln Tunnel.

I’ve heard a lot of negative things about the sanity rally, about its failure.   And the Republicans’ big night will probably be held up as evidence of this.

I went to the rally, but not for political reasons.  I went for the comedy.  And the underlying theme of sanity.  There were a ton of people and sanity was greatly appreciated.  Is that to imply that other rallies weren’t sane?  Is this some backhanded tea-party bashing?

Not really.

The last time I had been in D.C. was January 20, 2009.  Now that was a huge crowd.  We spilled out of Metro stations and surged in meandering waves through the streets, finally spreading out onto the National Mall, Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial (with distinct thinning after the Washington Monument).  And when the crowd tried to stuff itself back into the Metro after the event, my girlfriend and I stumbled into the National Museum of Natural History to wait out the crowd, only to be plunged into another crowd; the refugees in the museum.  People were huddled in rotundas and under exhibit display cases, sleeping through endless loops of films about Paleolithic Americans of the Southwest.  When the crowd had finally thinned enough and we dared to venture back out into the city, the scene was post-apocalyptic.  Trash littered the empty and cordoned-off streets and dust clouds swirled over the Mall’s lawn, which was trampled where it wasn’t completely barren.

That s@#* was insane.

And I’m sure many draw a specific correlation between Obama supporters and those who attended the sanity rally.  And I did vote for Obama.  But I’m not a fanatic.  I think the guy seems very intelligent and he has handled a pretty goddamn impossible situation reasonably well.  But that’s neither here nor there.  I didn’t go to the rally to galvanize the liberal base.  And neither did Jon Stewart and co., I don’t think.

I went because I loved the idea of attending a parody of a political rally, particularly one held on the National Mall.  And this wasn’t a parody of Glenn Beck’s rally.  This was a parody of the idea of all rallies.  You know, because politics are so retarded.  To wit, this is how I dressed for the event:

Doesn't get much more sane than this

And this is how my girlfriend, who is actually now my fiancée, showed her enthusiasm:

She will build a turtle fence

Of course some people were there for political reasons.  Some were straight-up Green Party supporters or were explicitly deriding the Tea Party and its associated properties.  Others were of the gray-haired variety and seemed to basically just enjoy the nostalgia of being in a large group of civic-minded citizens (these were the folks raising arms, splaying index and middle fingers and swaying back and forth to Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam’s sweet melody of yesteryear).  Still others were of the dispassionate, affluent persuasion who had come to the rally to gawk and insist that everyone was lame and ridiculous (particularly the guy in the Daredevil mask and giant foam finger behind them), everyone except them.

Really, the most negative thing you can say about the rally was it had serious technical (mainly audio problems).  I couldn’t hear a damn word the Myth Busters said, though I watched them escape from Alcatraz in our hotel room that evening and thought they were pretty interesting fellas.  I also had to settle for an obstructed view of a distant jumbotron, having no idea where the stage actually was.  There was also nearly constant jostling in the crowd, as the lack of designated aisles meant that, if you wanted to get somewhere (to the bathroom, to a better vantage point, to somewhere you could actually hear what was happening), you just started bushwhacking your way through the crushing throng and maybe made up some bullshit about how you had a child with you to play off people’s sympathies.  Or you waited for some other trailblazers to pass by and then hitched your caboose to that group as they snaked toward the promised land.

The rally wasn’t a revelatory or transformative event.  But it was funny (thankfully the audio problems had largely been resolved before the meat of the matter).  And there was a general feeling of civility, which, I have to say, was very pleasant.  As far as galvanizing, I truly did feel camaraderie with my fellow ralliers as we chanted “Lou-der!  Lou-der!  Lou-der!” in our frustration with the aforementioned audio problems.  And there was palpable excitement when various people struggled up tree trunks, desperate for a better view, and cheers erupted when they finally reached their arboreal perches.  Those moments were visceral and fun.  And Stewart’s closing remarks, while not funny, were very welcome and, frankly, sane.

Will the sanity continue?  I, for one, rode my sanity into the voting booth on Tuesday and voted for this guy.  Is that a good sign?

Frankly, the perpetually swinging political pendulum nauseates me and if we’re going to just keep throwing the bums out every two years, let’s give some truly new bums a chance.  Is that sane?  Well, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

And here we go again.

Perry Crowe is an author and editor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the brother of rockstar Brent Crowe.

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