davis presence at the Rally to Restore Sanity

[thespian.livejournal.com]

I'm curious who else from DSLJ is going to be heading down to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear?

(I'm taking Worldwide to NYC ($10), catching the HuffPost Sanity Bus there (free), and then returning on Monday on JetBlue ($7). My method of achieving Sanity is probably really insane. Especially since I sprained my ankle really badly 10 days ago. But cheap!)

Comments

[cos]

> This rally was -- as far as I know -- the reason John Stewart organized this one

Well, not really, though sort of. Glenn Beck, as you know, spouts a lot of extreme hyperbole, and Jon Stewart mocks it frequently. So definitely he is playing this up as a counter in that sense: not left vs. right, but calm and reasonable and fun vs. scary and extreme.

However, that's not "the reason" in the sense of having caused Stewart to organize it. The reason is that a few people on reddit commented about how great it would be if Stephen Colbert held a rally on the mall in his satirical persona, like the speech he gave at the 2006 White House Correspondents Association dinner.

Then, someone on reddit - who had seen a couple of these comments - had a dream about such a speech, woke up kinda on fire about that, and posted about it ... and the post caught on because it was really an idea whose time had come. It got thousands of votes very quickly, hundreds of thousands of hits, a web site was made, Colbert referred to it on his show, reddit took up Colbert's fundraising challenge of $500K for DonorsChoose, etc. etc. So the cause was that this was something people really wanted, reddit catalyzed that and showed Colbert and Stewart that people wanted it, and reddit got them to realize they ought to do it.