Mallrats

After the National Parks Service released its estimate of the attendees at the 1995 Million Man March, Louis Farrakhan and the other March organizers had such a shit fit that the Park Service simply stopped conducting such estimates. (The Park Service originally estimated the size of the crowd at 400,000 people. After the dispute hit the papers, ABC News commissioned a study that estimated there were 837,000 people. This failed to mollify Farrakhan, who maintained that there there damn well had to have been a million men at what was clearly labeled the Million Man March. I'd known for a long time that Farrakhan was hateful and deranged, but I'd never guessed what a boringly literal-minded nut job he was until I heard this.) This means that, for all the talk about how Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall yesterday was Beck's chance to either besmirch the memory of Martin Luther King or pick up his gauntlet, it's Farrakhan Beck can thank for the fact that there will be no "official" head count of his gathering of the tribes. I don't mean to suggest that Beck and Sarah Palin didn't pull a humongous crowd; it's just that, as Farrakhan's pouting fifteen years ago demonstrates, there's always a way to be disappointed by any concrete numeral, especially if you're a megalomaniac. The rally will always seem that much more of an awesome historical event to those who were there, or wish they had been, so long as they can always revise the size of the crowd upwards without fear of being contradicted by anything as dispiriting as factual accuracy. It's best for them if the actual numbers remain vague and unspecific, like everything else about the event.

Beck and Palin fans have a funny relationship to factual accuracy. As David Weigel puts it, "They are hungry for any information they might have missed that might point them to some revelation." Their problem is, they're looking for that information from charismatic individuals who, like Beck, freely admit that they didn't know anything about how politics and the way the world works until fairly recently, when they began to soak up "information" from the weirdest and most fanciful sources they could find, or who, like Palin, view any means of communication more cerebral than hitting people's emotional buttons with a mallet as a way to prove that they're listening to their guts as elitist malarkey. The rally was promoted as "non-political", and the organizers forbid people to hold up signs, presumably for fear that someone might wave around a slogan that wouldn't look real good on the news. (They let a few T-shirts slip through, though.) Beck may have hoped to stir up his fan base, but he must have also hoped that, by being on his best behavior, he could expand his audience and his celebrity. The test of just how much of a noodlehead Beck is may be the answer to this question: does he really think that he can do something to move the country forward without a program, an agenda, or anything more political than home-stitched bromides such as "America is good, not just because America is great, but because we are good! When we are good, we make America great!"

Maybe he does. Maybe his audience does. They may even think that "progressives" aren't just people with different politics than theirs but people who aren't good, who by the very nature of their un-goodness, are holding America back from being great, the way everybody knows it was when Ronald Reagan walked the Earth. I wonder, though, how many in that crowd were ready for all the religious talk; prevented by his own guidelines from trash-talking the President or anyone else, Beck, who has said that it was "divine providence" that caused him to schedule his rally at the same site and date as the rally at which King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, talked up God with every other breath. This may have been confounding to those in his camp who'd like their fake populism without the religious right Jesus gravy, but at least he didn't go to town with the crackpot numerology.

In truth, his big show had a lot in common with the Million Man March: both were pointless pseudo-events that used the bodies of thousands of people who felt disenfranchised and hoped to get a charge of strength from being in a mob of people with whom they felt they had something in common, all as a publicity stunt intended to help a mentally unbalanced demagogue achieve a more respectable public profile. And both were treated very kindly in most of the mainstream media, whose guardians must have been afraid they'd appear insensitive to the feelings of those who'd turned out for the things if they just quoted from the speeches while blowing raspberries and making jerking-off motions. In the end though, the Million Man March was sort of Farrakhan's last hurrah; he started to slide from public view soon after, not because he'd exposed himself as a raving nut (or any more of a raving nut than he already was) but because the country was fast becoming more and more multicultural, to the point that a black guy with a name like Barack Obama could get himself elected President. In other words, it was no longer the kind of place where black people looking for a champion might feel that they couldn't afford to turn their noses up at a raving nut. If Beck's moment goes on much longer, it'll be because angry white people who feel scared, overwhelmed, and outnumbered don't think they can afford to be as picky.