PRESENT TENSE:THE NOISE and fury of the midterm election season in the US will reach their peak this weekend. Today the National Mall in Washington DC is hosting a rally that will undoubtedly be the focus of media attention, even though the tens of thousands of marchers constitute one of the most under-represented constituencies in US political discourse: reasonable people not given to extremist outbursts.
The Rally to Restore Sanity, as it is called, is being organised by the comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the two Comedy Central talkshow hosts who are probably the finest political satirists in the US. So successful are they, and so influential have their programmes become, that President Barack Obama himself appeared on Stewart’s
The Daily Show
on Wednesday evening, while Colbert recently testified before the US congress on immigration issues. Their aim for the rally is encapsulated in the slogan for the day: “Take it down a notch for America.”
The event is an explicit attempt to counteract the extreme demagoguery of the Tea Party movement and, specifically, a huge rally organised the Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck, to be held in Washington on August 28th, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. (That date was a rather odious appropriation of King’s legacy of non-violent protest, implying that the overwhelmingly white Tea Party followers are equivalent to the oppressed African-Americans of the 1960s.) At its most extreme, the Tea Party movement has given rise to and legitimised the “Ground Zero mosque” protests and the Koran-burning saga.
Taking it down a notch against that kind of background is a difficult proposition, but today’s rally is designed to give a platform to the sort of people for whom public protest doesn’t normally appeal. As Stewart put it, the rally is for people who would like to get out and march but don’t have time to handcraft a sign.
The rise of Tea Party rallies and today’s response are evidence of the importance of public demonstrations. Organised protest is more than the sum of its parts, and the collective voice articulated by a mass rally is immeasurably more powerful than thousands of discrete opinions voiced by individuals. Such events are a reminder that the ballot box isn’t the only way for the public to express itself.
The political and social significance of large groups of people gathering to make a point is made clear by the extraordinary protests sweeping France in the past few weeks. Many Irish people have been watching the wave of marches and strikes, involving groups as diverse as school students, port workers and bin men, with a mix of admiration and bemusement. Why can't we stand up for ourselves like this, we ask. But when we realise that it is all about raising the retirement age to 62, the strength of their opposition becomes all the more astonishing. When organs such as the Economist sniffily point to France's 35-hour working week, the implication is that the French are a bunch of indolent, work-shy, Gitane-puffing dilettantes. But mon Dieu, who can deny they have shown a determination to work to keep what they've got?
Of course, we can’t help but compare ourselves unfavourably. How we have remained quite so supine during these wretched few years will remain one of the great questions of the age. There have, in fact, been numerous protests on the streets of the capital, but the only one that garnered any significant attention was that rather farcical Right to Work protest back in May, which ended with a few opportunists making a charge at the gardaí on duty. Despite the headlines of international news organisations eager for more Athenian-style riots to cover, that was about the height of our public anger.
In the aftermath of that fiasco, Fintan O’Toole wrote in this newspaper that “the very idea of peaceful protest is being squeezed between these twin forces of reckless adventurism on the one side and hysteria on the other . . . What gets lost is the importance and the potential effectiveness of mass protest.”
While the Greeks and the French have taken turns in showing us how to be masters of our own destiny, we have struggled with the notion of large-scale protest. The reasons are nuanced and manifold, and future sociologists and historians will undoubtedly speculate about why this might be so, but I do have a rather mundane theory of my own, which could be called “dance floor aversion syndrome”, admittedly a rather simplistic analogy based on crowd theory.
Just as the typical Irish male will studiously avoid a dance floor until a critical mass of friends has gathered there first, so will Irish people avoid committing to a public protest that doesn’t already have thousands leading the way. It doesn’t matter how much they might love the music or how much they might identify with the cause: for many, a relatively empty dance floor or a sparsely populated march might as well be a minefield.
In Washington today, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are bravely filling the role of the first people on the dance floor, gamely encouraging their friends to join them for a dance. Over here, however, the dance floor is still looking rather lonely.
dodwyer@irishtimes.com