A Report From the Front Lines of Sanity

Metro Pulse correspondent Dean Novelli files his report on Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear from Washington D.C.:

The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Keep Fear Alive has come and gone. As I try to capture the experience in words, I feel like the proverbial blind man describing what an elephant looks like.

This event was simply too large for any single perspective to begin to reveal what transpired. The best I can hope is to share a description of a knee, a trunk, and a tusk and by so doing convey a sense of rally day.

By now you've probably already heard media reports, dissecting and defining the rally for you. Maybe you even watched it live on Comedy Central. If you did, you saw more of the "scheduled event" than I. When I get back to Tennessee, I'll watch it on video and see for myself what I missed of Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's witty repartee.

So how can I go to a rally but not watch "the rally?" I blame it on a failure of technology. Turns out I had friends traveling from distant places to attend. The plan -- first set up via email -- was to call from the mall and meet up. But once on the mall the call wouldn't go through. As one stymied cell phone user lamented, "I've got five bars and no dial tone!"

There were simply too many people trying to use the same cell towers at the same time. I never got through to my friends to find out where they were. So instead I slowly walked the perimeter of the official rally site between 3rd and 7th streets, sign in hand hoping by chance to find them. Such luck wasn't mine.

Instead I discovered a fascinating "promenade" in progress. In more gentile times, people would dress in their Sunday best and stroll the fashionable boulevards hoping to see and be seen. Clearly an element of that was at play.

For me the real show occurred on the margins where a diverse crowd of ordinary and not so ordinarily dressed people watched, discoursed, and promenaded with signs.

And were there ever signs. Large signs, small signs, colorful signs, ironic signs, witty signs, moronic signs, indecipherable signs, politic signs and not so polite signs.

By far the most popular rally activity: taking pictures of signs and their makers. There are already websites with dozens and dozens of pictures of people with their signs. Google "Stewart rally signs" and enjoy.

My sign had a life of its own and was photographed literally a hundred times. But me not so much. "FEAR -- False Evidence Appearing Real" was attributed to EST and to Jesus -- although I couldn't get a chapter and verse for either. It was asked to stop and pose, and by the end it was so tired of being carried around that it plopped right down in front of the Hirshhorn Museum and became, for a moment, a piece of art.

A few favorites signs I saw:

"No Human Being is Illegal"

"You Can Pry My Sanity From My Warm Cozy Hands"

"Vote In Sanity"

And the people carrying these signs were as colorful and diverse as their messages. It being the day before Halloween, costumes were in order. Themed to go with their signs or just simply there to be seen.

There were more witches than I could count. And at least eight clever fellows dresses as Waldo so their friends at home could pick them out of the crowd.

Marie Antoinette, Wonder Woman, Sarah Palin, Christine O'Donnell, and Super Girl to name but a few femme fatales in attendance. A couple of gorillas, the Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood, and at least one Mama Grizzly were among the animals represented

There were pilgrims having witch trails, and tea partiers in tri-cornered hats -- yes those Tea Partiers. Even two separate couples dressed as tea bags.

Various metallic covered creatures, some human, some not. And an assortment of zombies eating brains. Something ThingOne and ThingTwo didn't have to worry about.

Costumed or not, all ages and many races were represented in the crowd, as Jon Stewart was pleased to note. And despite a promising comedic attempt at a head count, not a word about an official tally.

One snippet of conversation overheard, was a college student relaying to his friends how he had heard a pundit saying if Jon Stewart doesn't draw a million people to his rally it's a failure.

It's a classic propaganda technique I told them: Define your opponents success in an unachievable way so failure is the inevitable result.

So how many people were at the rally? I have nine toes and eight fingers that work well and after I counted them out a few hundred times I gave up. There were a lot of people there. So many that they climbed anything from trees to port-a-potties to ambulances to get a better view.

I've been to college football games with a hundred thousand screaming fans. Jon Stewart's rally was much more civil and better attended. But exactly how much better attended?

Consider this: The permit for the mall had an estimated attendance of 60,000. That space was filled. So were the sidewalk and steps of the museums on both side of the rally site. The crowd spilled down the sidewalks past the Smithsonian almost all the way to the Washington Monument. It seems to me Steward doubled his estimate.

But the telling indicator of an over flow crowd? The official vendors ran out of food and short on T-shirts and other merchandise. What better definition of success in a capitalist country is there than to sell out of all your stuff?

So how did I fare at the rally? I quipped on the Metro that if Stewart's and Colbert's rally was half as funny as Dave Chappell's Block Party I'd call it a success. I'll have to wait till I watch the tape to answer that. But I did engaged in many civil, sane and interesting conversations, see many clever and amusing sights, and got a free hug from a cute college boy holding a "Free Hugs" sign. What could be saner than a free hug?