Jon Stewart’s October 30th bout of rally envy—despite the comedian’s rickety attempts to disavow the patently invidious nature of the convocation—was hubristically (not to mention wishfully) titled “Restoring Sanity.” (Because of its obvious facetiousness, the Colbertian “Restoring Fear” portion of the event deserves no mention here.)

The danger of Stewart’s shedding his Daily Show mask of irony and becoming a full-fledged, Obama-style community-organizing activist is that in officially adopting the views of one political party over another, he devalues the only currency of the satirist—impartiality. Because human folly is an equal opportunity character flaw, the successful satirist must not take sides. He must be able to sling arrows in all directions, else the only thing he has to peddle—the precious honesty of his criticism—is called into question. A satirist who exposes the foibles of one political party and excuses those of the other is as useful as a bus that only goes in one direction. The bus company itself would soon also only go in one direction—out of business.

Those (I suspect Mr. Stewart is among them) who claim that the “Restoring Rally” was apolitical—just  a modern-day Woodstock with shorter hair and fewer hallucinogens, a Peace Train plea for reason and temperance—are either dupes or practitioners of a cunning form of political artifice.

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Saturday, August 28, 2010, my husband, two daughters, and I attended the Restoring Honor rally in Washington D.C. It was a wonderful experience for us all. The crowd was huge (500,000 + people), very peaceful, and individuals were kind and patient. You might think that the important part of the weekend was the three and a half hours (or more) that we spent together during the rally. When I was sitting under the bright, hot sun with my friends from Texas, I thought so too. But I was wrong…

During the first leg of our trip from D.C. to Chicago, our two daughters, ages 22 and 16, sat next to an African-American gentleman wearing an Obama inauguration t-shirt. After take-off, he mentioned to them that he had travelled to D.C. to attend Al Sharpton’s Reclaim the Dream rally. Our older daughter told him that they were in D.C. for the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally, and the conversation took off from there.

The gentlemen told my daughters that he went to the Restoring Honor rally with several friends because Al Sharpton told them that we were holding a negative protest that was against MLK’s message and against those who had gathered for Rev. Sharpton’s rally. He said that when he and his friends arrived that they didn’t see anything that they expected, so they stayed a bit to listen. They realized that Restoring Honor was not anything like what Rev. Sharpton told them to expect. They then returned to the Sharpton rally to try to tell several people that what Rev. Sharpton was saying about our rally was not true. He saw that our rally was not a political or hateful rally, and that it was not meant to divide Americans. He tried to get a message to Rev. Sharpton prior to his speech, but either he didn’t get the message or he ignored the message. Rev. Sharpton went forward with his original speech as planned.

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