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If you want to act out, if you want to run up, if you want to grow up, if you want to show up
Happy Halloween! Or All Saints' Day, since by now it's after midnight. I have returned to Boston.
I have also returned from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. The short version is that it was a mass transit nightmare, so well-attended that agoraphobia would have had to fight with claustrophobia for elbow room, and I was very glad to have gone. The longer version is shamelesssly cannibalized from an e-mail last night to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and can be found under the cut, because I'm going to bed. This weekend involved a lot of travel.
I don't think either The Daily Show or the District of Columbia had adequately assessed the number of people likely to show up to a satirical-political rally, because the Metro was, I believe the technical term is, a clusterfuck. Around eleven o'clock on Saturday morning, I left the house withdarthrami and my goddaughter, the adorable Noel. We got to the Rockville station and instantly had to split up, because I didn't have a Metro card and the line to purchase one was up the concrete steps and right around the block. (Note to self: next time, over-plan.) I waited on line for a Metro card. The rally started at noon. The line got longer. An animated discussion was taking place behind me in a language I didn't speak, but we were still on line. Around eleven-thirty, the stationmaster came through with an expression of terminal harassment and told everyone they were opening the turnstiles, not to bother with the cards, just go through before anyone was crushed to death or spontaneously caught fire, because we had apparently exceeded the safety limits for the area in front of the three or four farecard machines. (The platform was no less crowded, mind you, but at least it was out in the open air?) The first inbound train arrived and was so jam-packed, maybe three people got on. The next inbound train arrived and was so jam-packed, the rest abandoned all hope of human dignity and squished themselves in anyway. Somewhere between Grosvenor-Strathmore and Bethesda, I considered the logistics and concluded that I could in fact have sex with the people I was mashed up between without having to do anything more than undo a couple of zippers and possibly cover the eyes of the small child in the stroller parked against my knee. Changing at Metro Center was more of the same all over again, only more so; fortunately, the National Mall was a grand total of two stops down the Orange Line and everyone basically held their breath till then. I wish the same had been true of the people on the previous train who had decided to sing their way to sanity, because they only appeared to know the Flintstones theme song and the Herman's Hermits version of "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am," which has no verses. I got to the National Mall around one o'clock.
I never found Rami and Noel, orfleurdelis28 and sharhaun, or any of the other people I knew were supposed to be there. I could tell where the stage was from the red and blue lights I had sighted as I turned off Independence Ave. into the crowds, but I spent most of my time looking over people's shoulders and between their heads in order to catch small glimpses of the screens on which they were telecasting the stage action, although very often what I got was the time-honored backs of people's heads. I heard Sam Waterston's name. Something going on in the sound system had to do with trains. By inventive use of verges and a sort of osmotic crowd pressure, I worked my forward to Jefferson and 7th, at which point I was able to make out most of the lyrics to a magnificently bouncy, hyper-patriotic number called "There's No One More American Than Me," which I can only imagine has now been uploaded countless ("My roll of toilet paper used up sixty-seven trees!") times to YouTube. There were some black locust trees near where we were standing, if "stand" is a verb that can describe the action of sardines that have been tinned with a variety of homemade signs; kids started shinning up into them out of sheer effort to see something. Then a guy in a panda suit started climbing. He got so much applause. Especially when someone on the ground tossed him up his head, which he put on and began, quite reasonably, to browse the locust leaves. I mean, nobody around me had remembered to bring snacks, either.
(Saddest costume sighted at the rally: the guy who kept having to explain he was a teabag. He had loosely wrapped himself in cheesecloth. People kept helpfully telling him his bandages were unraveling.)
I don't know if I have sufficiently gotten across the sheer compression of people on the National Mall. I heard afterward that the crowd size was reckoned at a quarter of a million; my mother tells me this number has since been downgraded to 215,000, which is still not chopped liver. I think it would have been unbearable if it hadn't been such a nice crowd. Which it astonishingly, impressively was: the most obnoxious behavior I personally witnessed was the carrying of a very large RepubliCorp sign across the nearest field of vision (provoking a cry of "I agree with your position, I really hate your sign!" from directly behind me) and the people who yelled, "Obama isn't a Communist! Obama isn't a Socialist! We are! And you should be, too!" when the rest of us were trying to listen to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and R2-D2. There was endless bitching about the close quarters, the inability to see, and the fact that The Daily Show had drastically underestimated its popularity—seriously, whatever attendance they'd organized for, it wasn't enough—but not that resulted, at least where I could see, in anyone being shoved or sworn at or picked a fight with. Mostly people apologized for banging into one another and occasionally said wistful things like, "You know, we could just go watch this from a bar . . ." The whole reasonableness-represent really seems to have worked. At one point a stretcher had to come through for a medical emergency and people cleared out of the way, even if afterward they mourned the loss of the better view from the lane the paramedics had made.
Getting back from the rally was equally crushing, same fortunate temper applied. (We were not allowed down onto the platform of the Smithsonian station because it was stacked solid already, except then the pressure of new commuters behind the turnstiles became unmanageable and the police gave up and waved everyone through. I had to pay for my farecard, but until about Virginia Square/GMU, passenger proximity was once again intimate to the point of polymer interpenetration.) Did I mention that the cellphones were out? There was such a density of attempted communication, I think the networks simply crashed: no texts, no outgoing or incoming calls. I have no idea how media like Twitter and Facebook fared, but every now and then, someone around me would succeed in placing a call and everyone within earshot wanted to know they'd done it. I was therefore not only unable to meet up with anyone who might have come to the rally separately, I couldn't get hold of anyone afterward to plan: Rami, Selkie, B. No dice. A ground line was the obvious next step: I started asking about payphones. No one including the metropolitan police seemed to think there were any left. Occasionally passers-by laughed. And I am actually proud of this next bit, because I walked into the first museum that looked open—it turned out to be the National Museum of African Art—and asked the security guard whether by any chance they had a public telephone in the building, and he said yes, in the basement. In fact, there were two of them. I had to get change from the gift shop in order to try the first, which was broken and ate my money; the second produced a dial tone and took my fifty cents, with which I left a message for B. And indeed, there was an actual, metallic, non-electronically generated ring while I was attempting to text Rami or Selkie for the dozenth time and I picked the receiver up and said, "Hello?" and B. and I figured out our plans for the evening on what may be the last working payphone in Washington, D.C. Take that, future. He picked me up at West Falls Church and took me for chicken potstickers and pomegranate fresh-ginger ale at Big Bowl. Next time we see one another, he is showing me Cemetery Man (1994).
I am quite sure I would have heard and seen far more of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had I stayed home and watched the rally on Comedy Central. I wouldn't have had my novel about Ludwig Wittgenstein jostled out of my hand and nearly stepped on (which kind of doesn't surprise me) and I would almost certainly have eaten lunch. There wouldn't have been so much dust in the air that I got mud when I blew my nose. I don't know if the camera would have caught the sign that read, "I Know You're Hitler, Don't Try to Deny It—You're Invading Poland As We Speak." I couldn't make out all the words to Jon Stewart's closing speech, which I think was quite good, but I heard the cheering around it.
And let us be honest: whether I was part of a historic moment or merely a rather awesome pop-cultural oddity, I am not sure where else I would have been afforded the opportunity to hear a college guy in a gorilla suit plowing through a crowd shouting in a voice of genuine anxiety, "Has anyone seen Paul Bunyan? Why does everyone laugh when we say that?" For me, that guy will always symbolize the Rally to Restore Sanity. The Dadaists would have approved.
I have also returned from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. The short version is that it was a mass transit nightmare, so well-attended that agoraphobia would have had to fight with claustrophobia for elbow room, and I was very glad to have gone. The longer version is shamelesssly cannibalized from an e-mail last night to
rushthatspeaks and can be found under the cut, because I'm going to bed. This weekend involved a lot of travel.I don't think either The Daily Show or the District of Columbia had adequately assessed the number of people likely to show up to a satirical-political rally, because the Metro was, I believe the technical term is, a clusterfuck. Around eleven o'clock on Saturday morning, I left the house with
darthrami and my goddaughter, the adorable Noel. We got to the Rockville station and instantly had to split up, because I didn't have a Metro card and the line to purchase one was up the concrete steps and right around the block. (Note to self: next time, over-plan.) I waited on line for a Metro card. The rally started at noon. The line got longer. An animated discussion was taking place behind me in a language I didn't speak, but we were still on line. Around eleven-thirty, the stationmaster came through with an expression of terminal harassment and told everyone they were opening the turnstiles, not to bother with the cards, just go through before anyone was crushed to death or spontaneously caught fire, because we had apparently exceeded the safety limits for the area in front of the three or four farecard machines. (The platform was no less crowded, mind you, but at least it was out in the open air?) The first inbound train arrived and was so jam-packed, maybe three people got on. The next inbound train arrived and was so jam-packed, the rest abandoned all hope of human dignity and squished themselves in anyway. Somewhere between Grosvenor-Strathmore and Bethesda, I considered the logistics and concluded that I could in fact have sex with the people I was mashed up between without having to do anything more than undo a couple of zippers and possibly cover the eyes of the small child in the stroller parked against my knee. Changing at Metro Center was more of the same all over again, only more so; fortunately, the National Mall was a grand total of two stops down the Orange Line and everyone basically held their breath till then. I wish the same had been true of the people on the previous train who had decided to sing their way to sanity, because they only appeared to know the Flintstones theme song and the Herman's Hermits version of "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am," which has no verses. I got to the National Mall around one o'clock.I never found Rami and Noel, or
fleurdelis28 and sharhaun, or any of the other people I knew were supposed to be there. I could tell where the stage was from the red and blue lights I had sighted as I turned off Independence Ave. into the crowds, but I spent most of my time looking over people's shoulders and between their heads in order to catch small glimpses of the screens on which they were telecasting the stage action, although very often what I got was the time-honored backs of people's heads. I heard Sam Waterston's name. Something going on in the sound system had to do with trains. By inventive use of verges and a sort of osmotic crowd pressure, I worked my forward to Jefferson and 7th, at which point I was able to make out most of the lyrics to a magnificently bouncy, hyper-patriotic number called "There's No One More American Than Me," which I can only imagine has now been uploaded countless ("My roll of toilet paper used up sixty-seven trees!") times to YouTube. There were some black locust trees near where we were standing, if "stand" is a verb that can describe the action of sardines that have been tinned with a variety of homemade signs; kids started shinning up into them out of sheer effort to see something. Then a guy in a panda suit started climbing. He got so much applause. Especially when someone on the ground tossed him up his head, which he put on and began, quite reasonably, to browse the locust leaves. I mean, nobody around me had remembered to bring snacks, either.(Saddest costume sighted at the rally: the guy who kept having to explain he was a teabag. He had loosely wrapped himself in cheesecloth. People kept helpfully telling him his bandages were unraveling.)
I don't know if I have sufficiently gotten across the sheer compression of people on the National Mall. I heard afterward that the crowd size was reckoned at a quarter of a million; my mother tells me this number has since been downgraded to 215,000, which is still not chopped liver. I think it would have been unbearable if it hadn't been such a nice crowd. Which it astonishingly, impressively was: the most obnoxious behavior I personally witnessed was the carrying of a very large RepubliCorp sign across the nearest field of vision (provoking a cry of "I agree with your position, I really hate your sign!" from directly behind me) and the people who yelled, "Obama isn't a Communist! Obama isn't a Socialist! We are! And you should be, too!" when the rest of us were trying to listen to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and R2-D2. There was endless bitching about the close quarters, the inability to see, and the fact that The Daily Show had drastically underestimated its popularity—seriously, whatever attendance they'd organized for, it wasn't enough—but not that resulted, at least where I could see, in anyone being shoved or sworn at or picked a fight with. Mostly people apologized for banging into one another and occasionally said wistful things like, "You know, we could just go watch this from a bar . . ." The whole reasonableness-represent really seems to have worked. At one point a stretcher had to come through for a medical emergency and people cleared out of the way, even if afterward they mourned the loss of the better view from the lane the paramedics had made.
Getting back from the rally was equally crushing, same fortunate temper applied. (We were not allowed down onto the platform of the Smithsonian station because it was stacked solid already, except then the pressure of new commuters behind the turnstiles became unmanageable and the police gave up and waved everyone through. I had to pay for my farecard, but until about Virginia Square/GMU, passenger proximity was once again intimate to the point of polymer interpenetration.) Did I mention that the cellphones were out? There was such a density of attempted communication, I think the networks simply crashed: no texts, no outgoing or incoming calls. I have no idea how media like Twitter and Facebook fared, but every now and then, someone around me would succeed in placing a call and everyone within earshot wanted to know they'd done it. I was therefore not only unable to meet up with anyone who might have come to the rally separately, I couldn't get hold of anyone afterward to plan: Rami, Selkie, B. No dice. A ground line was the obvious next step: I started asking about payphones. No one including the metropolitan police seemed to think there were any left. Occasionally passers-by laughed. And I am actually proud of this next bit, because I walked into the first museum that looked open—it turned out to be the National Museum of African Art—and asked the security guard whether by any chance they had a public telephone in the building, and he said yes, in the basement. In fact, there were two of them. I had to get change from the gift shop in order to try the first, which was broken and ate my money; the second produced a dial tone and took my fifty cents, with which I left a message for B. And indeed, there was an actual, metallic, non-electronically generated ring while I was attempting to text Rami or Selkie for the dozenth time and I picked the receiver up and said, "Hello?" and B. and I figured out our plans for the evening on what may be the last working payphone in Washington, D.C. Take that, future. He picked me up at West Falls Church and took me for chicken potstickers and pomegranate fresh-ginger ale at Big Bowl. Next time we see one another, he is showing me Cemetery Man (1994).
I am quite sure I would have heard and seen far more of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had I stayed home and watched the rally on Comedy Central. I wouldn't have had my novel about Ludwig Wittgenstein jostled out of my hand and nearly stepped on (which kind of doesn't surprise me) and I would almost certainly have eaten lunch. There wouldn't have been so much dust in the air that I got mud when I blew my nose. I don't know if the camera would have caught the sign that read, "I Know You're Hitler, Don't Try to Deny It—You're Invading Poland As We Speak." I couldn't make out all the words to Jon Stewart's closing speech, which I think was quite good, but I heard the cheering around it.
And let us be honest: whether I was part of a historic moment or merely a rather awesome pop-cultural oddity, I am not sure where else I would have been afforded the opportunity to hear a college guy in a gorilla suit plowing through a crowd shouting in a voice of genuine anxiety, "Has anyone seen Paul Bunyan? Why does everyone laugh when we say that?" For me, that guy will always symbolize the Rally to Restore Sanity. The Dadaists would have approved.
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We worked Colbert and Stewart into our soul caking play.
Nine
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Nice.
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My pleasure!
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I was recently introduced to the adjective clustercoital, and I'm never going to let it go.
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That is a thing of beauty.
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Obama isn't a Communist! Obama isn't a Socialist! We are! And you should be, too!
Leaving me with the line "Could you be right when Kareem and the droid aren't talking?"
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I really wasn't joking about the agora-claustrophobia cagematch: I don't even want to think what it must have been like within real earshot of the stage. But again, I didn't hear that anyone got trampled. I approve of people not being trampled!
IT sounds, however, like an amazing experience.
It was really something. I hate crowds. The Metro is evil. My brain chemistry was not the best. I'm incredibly glad to have been there.
Leaving me with the line "Could you be right when Kareem and the droid aren't talking?"
Yeah . . .
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Glad you had a good time!
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Which I have only watched on television, because yikes . . .
Glad you had a good time!
I really did!
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Welcome!
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Hee!
There was plenty of Facebooking from the mall (and from the lines for the Metro) from my friends list, I can tell you that much.
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Ah, the future gets a few points in . . .
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Thank you so much for sharing this.
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Welcome. It's the sort of thing I want to remember in years.