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On last night’s Daily Show and Colbert Report hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, respectively, announced that they would be holding concurrent rallies on the Mall, in Washington, D.C., on October 30. Stewart’s event, the Rally to Restore Sanity, will urge citizens to “take it down a notch for America.” This means, according to the host, attendees are assembling to encourage others to ”stop shouting, throwing and drawing Hitler mustaches on people other than Hitler.” Colbert’s convention, “Keep Fear Alive,” aspires to achieve precisely the opposite. According to PopEater, in a press release about the event, Comedy Central gave its word that the rivaling rallies would “bigger than Nixon/Kennedy, Ali/Foreman, Aniston/Jolie, 50/Nas, Joe/the Volcano, Alien/Predator, Bunny/Fudd and Ecks/Sever combined.” Another question, though, is whether the pow-wow will garner the same turn-out and press coverage as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s Restoring Honor, a summertime Tea Party variety show, which drew crowd of anywhere from 100,00 to a million, depending on who‘s lying to you.This is, at least, the comparison most news outlets seem to most readily deploy. But Stewart, whose opinions are, at least more so than Colbert’s irony-cloaked commentary, a more explicit vocalization of the two hosts’ political views, wrote that the rally is courting “people who've been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs)—not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority.” He continued, “If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence ... we couldn’t. That’s sort of the point.” Contrast his measured, almost disinterested description with that of Beck’s rally. “Our freedom is possible only if we remain virtuous,” an event description for Restoring Honor warned. “Help us restore the values that founded this great nation.” Should Stewart have chosen to invoke similar urgency and seriousness of purpose in the Rally to Restore Sanity language, it would not have been inconsistent with his values. It’s obvious he feels strongly about curbing Beck’s malignant effect on political discourse. Both Beck and Stewart are genuine in their concern, but Beck’s pleas for participation are more earnest entreaties than those of Stewart. Fear, insistence, and desperation (and not Colbert’s kinds) are what drive people from their homes and jobs to public rallies, and Stewart, a deft cultural critic, knows this. If he wanted his rally to draw the same crowds and drum up the same media frenzy as that of the Beck event, he would have actively campaigned to achieve these effects. Perhaps the Rally to Restore Sanity and the March to Keep Fear Alive are not so much rivals of the Beck rally but more of a coda—an asterisk after the Restoring Honor name that’s not arguing for another political persuasion but simply questioning the value of assembling on the National Mall and creating one’s opinions in the image of a television host.