One does not need to go far in America for confirmation that the middle ground is a foreign land, and one that few natives have the passport to visit. Recently, this realisation came about 10 minutes from my front door.

"Are you aware of the dangers of fornication?" a woman who looked like she had walked out of the pages of Little House on the Prairie asked me in New York's Washington Square. Before I could even ask her where DID one buy bonnets from these days, she handed me a leaflet warning – with accompanying stick-figure illustrations – that fornication causes "dirty thoughts; lustful motives and selfish friendships" (and, to be fair, one can't really argue with any of those points).

Just as I was about to figure out what that stick figure next to point two on the list was supposed to be doing, another leaflet was shoved my way, this time advertising lessons at a local sex shop where I could learn how to do things that would probably not be approved of by people in bonnets. Interestingly, the two leaflets weren't that different – both favoured the list format and both were fond of the word "filthy" – it's just that one had more of an emphasis on the Corinthians and the other's only commandment was that "lube should be your BFF". Chastity or lube? As we say in America: and these are my options?

Sex, food, body image, politics: America operates in extremes, and usually very loud ones as just a few minutes of watching the TV "news" proves. Would you like to unwind by being shouted at by Fox News's apocalyptic rightwing hosts? Or how about being patronised by MSNBC's smugly liberal presenters?

Maybe it's because the country is so big that one has to shout to be heard. Maybe it's because a nation that bequeathed to the world "college rock" could only be a heavy-handed one. Whichever, the most extreme thing of all is about to happen next month. And it's one so – to use a word favoured by the Tea Partyists, a semi-political movement whose lingua franca is hysteria – revolutionary that it is difficult to imagine how any of the cable news networks will cover it: Jon Stewart is marching for moderation.

Once upon a more moderate time, it would have been at least very worrying that a talkshow on a channel called Comedy Central would become the main source of news for most young Americans. But that was in a simpler, pre-Fox News era and the truth is that Stewart's The Daily Show is probably the best TV news in America now, its knee never jerking, its allegiances never unthinkingly fixed.

Despite his willingness to criticise the Obama administration when criticism is due, if Fox News's Glenn Beck is the current face of American conservatism, then Stewart is unquestionably the figurehead for American liberalism, especially as the current administration continues to slip into some kind of anaemic paralysis.

So it is both inevitable and a little depressing that the most anticipated upcoming liberal rally is not any of the ones Obama is having in the run-up to the midterm elections, but Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity on 30 October, making an obvious poke at Beck's recent Restoring Honor rally.

It would be easy when mocking such a one-sided clown as Beck to go to a similar extreme. I find this particularly tempting when talking about the Tea Partyists. Their obsession with "ideological purity" – and their fondness for calling Republicans they feel fail that test RINOs (Republican in Name Only) – is so weirdly close to the Nazi mindset they often accuse their opponents of having, that it's hard to resist throwing it back at them.

Yet Stewart has stayed rooted to the calm middle ground, proclaiming on the rally's website that his march is for people who "believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler moustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler" (as I make a shamed nod of agreement here).

Fox News will probably portray Stewart's rally as elitists mocking the mythical homeland supporters that Beck worked so hard to pretend his rally represented. But if you lived your life in fear of Fox News's opinion, you would never leave your house. And they'd still hate you.

How Stewart has maintained a level head despite the attacks on him from the right, and working in the media in this country, is a mystery and inspiration. He is – and I mean this as the highest compliment – what lies between chastity and lube.

I'd love to go to the Tea Party

When I grow up, I want to be a female Tea Party politician. Just think of the hair! So glossy, so thick (please, obvious jokes are just tacky). And so much attention in return for so little intellectual investment! But that's because, hey, they're women! The perfect Trojan horses in which the far right can stuff their most asinine beliefs, such as that rape victims should make "a lemon situation into lemonade" (Sharron Angle).

Many books appeared after the 2008 election looking at Hillary Clinton's campaign, the best of which was Gail Collins's When Everything Changed. But, as Rebecca Traister writes in the new Big Girls Don't Cry, what really changed was how a new group of female politicians springboarded off Clinton's back – just not the kind that most hoped for. First there was Sarah Palin, of course, brought in to scoop up female votes, followed by a slew of others touted as "the new Palins", the way that every underdog on a TV talent show is "the new Susan Boyle". A gender is not defined by the few. But when pondering how a rape can be sugared into lemonade, you can feel the wind on your face as you are pushed two steps back from the tentative step you took forward.