With Nary a Gun in Sight

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The first ever "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" is in the history books. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert staged their comedy/music event supposedly as a calming counterpoint to the hysterical Glenn Beck/Fox News-inspired Tea Party rallies of the past few months.
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The Rally was highly anticipated, mainly because no one had any idea what the two comedians were planning to do or what kind of show the Rally would be. And for the first hour, it looked like the whole thing might lurch toward one, huge, uninspired debacle. The Roots took the stage first and Black Thought rapped for what seemed like long, slow, torturous, ear-bleeding hours. Sorry to all the young post-pubers out there, but rap is a very limited music form, at best, and listening to one man's monotone, repetitive word-play for thirty straight minutes just sounds like nerve-grating white noise. Luckily, John Legend joined the band at one point, and his singing saved the opening of the show. But then, the two guys who host the t.v. show, "Mythbusters", next took the stage and for another excruciatingly long thirty minutes, they forced the crowd into human experiments featuring "the wave". So by the end of the first hour, one could almost imagine hundreds in the crowd wondering if maybe they should just call it a day and head home.

But then, finally, Stewart and Colbert took the stage for several comedy bits, better musical acts followed and the show ended up being quite an entertaining spectacle. The highlights of the show included the Kid Rock/Sheryl Crow duet, the bestowing of the "Reasonable Awards", and the emergence of Colbert on the stage in a Chilean miner rocket tube.
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(sheryl crow)

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(yusuf islam)

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.But the Rally also had moments which flirted with greatness. The Mavis Staples rendition of "You Are Not Alone", backed by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy was a truly inspired musical moment, but the stunner of the day was when the legendary Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, made a rare American stage appearance. From the silence of the crowd when Yusuf took the stage, we're guessing most of the attendants, who were under 40, didn't even know who Yusuf was. If the crowd had skewed slightly older, we have no doubt Yusuf's appearance would have drawn a very loud gasp, followed by monstrous cheers. God, we miss Cat Stevens!
 

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(jeff tweedy and mavis staples)
 

.Stewart ended the return to sanity rally with a serious plea for, well, a return to sanity. He made the point that most Americans find a way to get along, "Everywhere but there," he said as he pointed to the capitol building behind him, and he also blasted the 24 hour news media for ginning up the national anger and hysteria. We'd call the Rally a fairly successful event/show, at which point we'd normally say that we'd like to see the show repeated every year. But considering the reason for the Rally was that our society is more politically divided than ever, and that Congress is corrupt and almost completely unable to function, we're actually hoping that there won't ever be a need to stage a rally like this one ever again. But don't hold your breath, no one's managed to sneak into the mausoleum and drive a stake into the heart of Dick Cheney just yet.
 

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