Thoughts on the Rally to Restore Sanity

I remember it very clearly. You see, I'm a closet patriot. I cringe even typing that word it's so loaded now, but I am. I do love this country, most especially its highest ideals. And because of that, I remember.

I was there on the Mall on January 20, 2009 when Barack Obama was inaugurated. I remember the vibe that day was of renewal. We had retaken our country. Here, after eight years of George W. Bush, a miserable President and proud anti-intellectual, we had elected an intelligent, eloquent, young guy who shared our ideals. He was going to raise up the poor and downtrodden, bring clean energy, and on and on.

Visualize: The Oath of Office ends, the Army fires a 21 Gun Salute, the band strikes up "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Battle-hardened hipsters, people who build an identity around being unimpressed by everything, dance jigs.

I can only assume that many of these same people will again take to the Mall on Saturday next for what is now apparently being called "The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear."

Now, no one seems to really know what this rally is supposed to stand for. It is certainly a response of some kind to Glenn Beck's rally, but it doesn't appear to actually have a message other than that which is best expressed in one of its taglines: "The rally for people too busy to go to rallies."

What that means, as far as I can tell, is that it's a rally for people who are too good to go to rallies. Or, more precisely, people who are too cool to go to rallies. It's important to note that this does not restrict the implicit criticism to Tea Partiers, although methinks it will be seen as such both by attendees and the Tea Party alike.

Whatever the fallout, the driving force of this rally will be antipathy. It will be a crowd largely predisposed to cynicism, made more cynical by its disappointment at the Obama Administration's seeming failure to fight (hard) for the ideals that they dropped their armor and believed in.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with this rally. The people too busy for rallies are the people that should be rallying the most! They're the smart ones! Indeed, if they could be bothered, they'd be a force to be reckoned with. Say what you will about the Tea Party, but they go home and work for it. They send the e-mails, they call their friends. When the only thing that can get the effete young liberal intelligentsia out the door and down to the Mall is Jon Stewart, it's no wonder we live with the spectre of President Palin.