newjerseynewsroom.com

BY SUZANNE CLOUD

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

The day before I headed south to attend the conjoined rallies of comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, DC, I taught my usual freshman English composition class at Rowan University — Friday's class was on rhetorical fallacies and how to spot them in anyone's written argument or speech. Past episodes of The Daily Show are an excellent resource for illustration and the students always laugh as they zero in (along with Stewart) on the obvious hasty generalizations, ad hominem attacks, and false dichotomies that are presented by his "news correspondents" in the field.

Walking down Louisiana Avenue to the National Mall and ruminating on Stewart's brazenness for calling this rally (Washington Post columnist Carlos Lozada begged him to cancel it), I just happened to bump into possibly the most famous Republican rhetorician of them all — Frank Luntz. He jumped out of his shiny black limo (at least I think it was a limo; it looked awfully nice) and was on the sidewalk asking passersby if they knew where the rally was being held. I'm not kidding. Luntz, the coiner of the phrase "death tax," the ultimate Washington insider notorious for flipping meanings like so many hamburgers and serving them up hot to manipulate public debate and public thinking on issues as important as financial reform, education, oil drilling, and global warming, was standing in front of me in the nippy morning air asking some lanky, adolescent out-of-towner where the action was.

The rally really was everything I thought it would be: there was no way I'd ever be able to see it all and no way I'd ever be able to hear it all. But the people (6 billion, according to Colbert) were surprising. The "Free Mumia" folks never showed up, but two guys dressed as the Ambiguously Gay Duo from Saturday Night Live did. Homemade signs were bereft of any ad hominem attacks on George Bush or Dick Cheney, but one did poke fun at the Tea Party a bit with: "This sign is spelled correctly!" I caught a musician billing himself as the "Congressional Hillbilly" playing ragtime piano on an acoustic upright someone had rolled in, while a tall guy dressed in a poncho, a Predator mask, a pair of lizard hands, and a sombrero danced nearby. Jesus looked good, holding a sign "I fear 4 you," while the superhero "The Unemployed Man" posed for pictures with anyone (for minimum wage, of course). But my real brush with greatness came when I met reporter Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now! In shy earnest, she greeted me and smiled, then pressed a flyer for her television news show in my hand.

Everyone was just so nice. And as I heard Mavis Staples soulfully sing our national anthem, I wondered: Why are these people here? Why are these folks laughing, buffeted by the laws of Brownian movement as they jockey for some kind of position in the massive crowd? I overheard bits of snatched conversation as I bumped back and forth in the multitude and realized: they love Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

They treasure these two men, this glorious duo, because they are a magical combination of court jester and West African griot playfully inflicting psychic pain on the pompous, the pious and the prevaricating. Stewart and Colbert expose the blizzard of lies that bombard the public. These guys help us to breathe easier just for a moment and assure us that our sense of reality really hasn't lost its way — it's just been delegitimized by professional rhetoricians and the folks that pay them to put words in the mouths of professional politicians. Stewart and Colbert make us feel that, for this one moment in time, we're not going to let them get away with it.

I ended up in the bar at the Art and Soul Restaurant along with a bunch of other rally-goers with aching feet who had limped in to watch Jon Stewart's closing speech to the crowd. He seemed perplexed about the turnout, and asked: "What exactly was this?"

Breaking into spontaneous applause over and over again (in the bar and on the National Mall), the weary crowd nodded as he spoke of the fun house mirror we are forced to look into endlessly — "not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin and an eyeball."

Stewart simply pointed out that we're not monsters with giant foreheads or month-old pumpkin asses, and neither are our neighbors. Of course, we know that deep down. But it's nice to get in out of the wind of unkindness that seems to pervade our lives these days.

From The Daily Show, my students learned that the "accepted wisdom" splurting from the media is usually nothing more than rhetorical sleight-of-hand created to wring something out of the watcher, and I was reminded on Saturday that this lesson should be a mandatory requirement on every college syllabus.

It was a good day to watch these two wild and crazy guys hose off the sludge the truth is sometimes buried in and then parade it around wearing polka-dot pants. That was why everybody was there, Jon. Pretty simple. I'm surprised you didn't see it, dude.

Suzanne Cloud Tapper PhD; Writer/Editor/Researcher can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it