Rally To Restore Sanitation

Admittedly, I've never watched The Colbert Report or The Daily Show, so my preconceptions of what to expect at the Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall this afternoon were a bit skewed by my finely-tuned skepticism of all things remotely suspicious or fishy-smelling.

In large measure, the crowd was overwhelmingly white. I only mention this because the Tea Party is routinely excoriated by the MSM for being notoriously white with no visible minorities. I know from personal experience that this is far from true and also abject sophistry.

The turnout was (to me), surprisingly spectacular. I took the Metro from Vienna and got off at Foggy Bottom, mistakenly thinking the festivities were at the Reflecting Pool/Lincoln Memorial.
The wait to get on the train was long and the lines for tickets and platform access was nothing shy of The Rally to Restore Honor-esque.

I walked a twisting mile or so from 23rd Street to the heart of the venue near the U.S. Capitol, the size and scope of the crowd growing more and more evident once beyond the Washington Monument.

The Nerds, Socialists, Anarchists, Malcontents, Pot Heads, Collectivists, Obama Sycophants, No Borders Crowd and Staunch Secularists were mainly college students who spent little time blowing money on trivialities such as soap, deodorant or grooming products. Where you have the afore-mentioned, you will have the mandatory left over Viet Nam War protesters with gray pony tails wearing tie-dyed shirts. (NTS:Thinking World Bank Protesters here.)

Before long, it became apparent that these people had a strange fascination with dinosaurs and space travel. There were a lot of folks dressed in Halloween costumes, so there may be a blurry area between what was exaggerated camp and just plain straight-up camp; these people have a sense of humor...zoinks!

Take their signs, for example:

"This Is A Sign"
"You Come to the Rally with the Sign you have, not the Sign you wish you had"
"Smoke Weed Everyday"
"I Hate Crowds"
"Women Own All the Vaginas"
"I shaved My Balls For This?"

But my personal favorite was the three college boys (admittedly cute in a dirty way), holding their hands up above their heads, clutching imaginary posters. I asked them to turn around so I could read their "signs," and they obliged. I took their picture.

This stuff was funny and I caught myself having fun.

I kept moving, however slowly, through the throngs, the stage and Jon Liebowitz's voice bellowing incoherently off to my right. A great roar would rise up occasionally from the zombies and then more hysterical bellowing would resume.

It actually occurred to me at some point that this might well be the last time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would have to lament the offensive odor of tourists converging on the Capitol.

Maybe the most curious phenomenon I witnessed this afternoon was the sheer number of people sitting on top of the portable toilets. Hundreds of them, to the extent that some of the units' roofs were caving in from the weight. Though I couldn't hear the message being broadcast (at all), I had to imagine (with great difficulty), how important it must have been for these toilet-sitters to hear it that they endure huffing human feces fumes from a vent pipe on a dirty toilet roof.

Hey man, that's funny as sh*t!

I ended up walking to Dupont Circle (16 blocks), and grabbing a couple beers so as to endure the inevitable crush of stinky Collectivists on the Metro ride home.