http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/the_daily_show/index.html?story=/ent/tv/2010/10/26/rally_to_restore_sanity_mysteryThe Rally to Restore Sanity: Why the secrecy?
Jon Stewart and his team have yet to reveal any real details about Saturday's big event. Is this a sign of trouble?
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
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Why are plans still being so tightly guarded? Is it because it's going to be so mind-blowing that to whisper a word of what will happen would ruin it? Because they're still winging it and don't yet have the details sussed out? I contacted the show's publicists Monday for specifics, and as of Tuesday morning had not heard back. But with mere days left before the event and anticipation high – "TDS" has relocated for this whole week to Washington and the president himself is Wednesday's guest -- there is another, considerably darker possible reason for all the secrecy.
A few weeks ago, I attended a taping of "The Daily Show," and was dismayed to find the security ramped up to just shy of a full cavity check. When I had been there a year earlier security was thorough too, but I didn't have a guard confiscate my copy of Entertainment Weekly and demand I take my coat off the empty seat next to me. (He wound up giving me back the magazine, right before saying, "If I see you take it out, I'm wrestling you to the ground.") When Stewart emerged to do his pre- and post-show chats with the audience, a stone-faced guard stood close by the whole time.
Could it be that the prospect of restoring sanity scares the hell out of certain members of the extreme fringe – enough to turn them downright dangerous? Perhaps the organizers figure the true fans of rational thought can figure out a plan for the day on their own, but they don't want to give the more volatile element any extra help.A few clues, however, are beginning to emerge. On Monday, "TDS" introduced us to six of the "tens of hundreds of millions of Americans" going to the rally on the show's Sanity Bus, including a Winston-Salem pizza maker who said he's tired of "the far left and the far right," a Georgia "conservative college student" and notably, a New Jersey "pair of lifelong Democrats" who "don't like extremes." One message clear from a show that has delivered two years of brilliant barbs at the Obama White House -- this is not a rally to restore the Democratic Party. But perhaps the philosophical imperative of the event was best summed up by the Muslim-American Sanity Bus rider who said, "I don't believe I am required every day to prove day and night that I am as good as anybody." Because whether you're Muslim or you're gay or you're red state or blue, it's time to stop being held accountable by the idiots. And that's the ongoing message of Comedy Central's powerhouse duo.
Despite the big event's baffling layers of enigma, "The Daily Show" and Colbert's fans have come to expect a high dose of moral integrity served up with those nightly spoonfuls of righteous, hilarious indignation. We know it feels more powerful, when assessing the often-dire state of the world, to laugh than to yell. Or to cry. If you want proof of the optimism of the American character, it's there in the hope that something true and good and substantial can come out of getting together on America's front lawn to watch two comedians, with barely a clue of what anybody will do next. And maybe that's enough.
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