It was riveting, at times utterly thrilling stuff, with both sides gracefully doing the dance of abundant, obvious admiration while firmly maintaining their own convictions. This is what happens when people don’t scream and hurl nonsense invective at each other. Watch and learn, America.

A wan-looking Stewart — who admitted he was battling a vicious stomach flu and bragged near the end that this was the longest he’d gone without throwing up in some time — clearly chose Maddow because he had a few things to get off his chest. On “Maddow,” he was free to be something other than the brilliant satirist we know and love on Comedy Central. He was simply Jon Stewart, lamenting to his hostess that “You’re in the playing field; I’m in the stands yelling things.” But he seemed nonetheless grateful for the opportunity to explain the motivation for the rally because “People should have a chance to say what they thought it was … I just want a chance to say what it was, because I made it.”

So what was it all about? As Stewart persuasively argued, “We’ve all bought into the idea that the conflict in the country is left and right, Republicans and Democrats.” Furthermore, an insidious, attention-grabbing news media “amplifies a division that I don’t think is the right fight … [because] both sides have their way of shutting down debate.”

“It’s become tribal,” he declared, and the major culprits aren’t Tea Partying loons — they’re the CNNs and Foxes and, yes, MSNBCs of the world. “The problem with a 24-hour news cycle is it’s built for a particular thing — 9/11,” he explained, noting sagely that “O.J.’s not going to kill someone every day.” Meanwhile, “The real conflict is corruption vs. non-corruption, extremists vs. non-extremists.”

The Maddow interview was a stunning example of the increasing greatness of Stewart, a man who, unlike every faux or ostensibly real cable news pontificator out there not named Anderson Cooper, is distinguished by his compassion-rich lack of objectivity. Other pundits may have opinions and stances galore, but few possess Stewart’s fearless embrace of that oft-overlooked essential quality — empathy.

That ability to walk in others’ moccasins is his supreme strength — Stewart does not let anybody off the hook for merely being members of the same choir to which he preaches. “We have a tendency to grant amnesty to people we agree with, and be dismissive of people we don’t,” he told Maddow, with blistering insight. Later he challenged her, “Do you think the left ever suffers from myopia?”

He was at times maddeningly indulgent, granting reasonable doubt to George Bush for our ongoing nightmare in Iraq and Afghanistan by asking, “What is their intention? Is it to save American lives?” He questioned how helpful it is “if the place you start is ‘he’s an evil man who lied to us’ … I do think he believes Sadaam was dangerous.” And he told liberal America, to its intense discomfort, “You have to examine your own orthodoxy.”

Maddow, meanwhile, was engagingly pugnacious throughout, telling Stewart in no uncertain terms, for example, that Bush’s much justified torture strategy was “wrong for the country and he shouldn’t have been doing it” and “I’m happy to scream it.” But she also insisted, “I feel like we’re doing the same thing. We both have a commitment to not lying, to telling the truth where we see it.” Bring on the unironic truthiness!

In the end, there was no shouting, zero cutting of microphones. Instead, there was Stewart, telling Maddow in utter sincerity, “I like you.” Undeniably, in many ways they’re different sides of the same coin. They’re two bright, funny hyperintelligent people who do best when they’re sparring — and yowsa, they’re fun to watch. And Stewart’s explanation that the rally “was to articulate an intangible feeling that people are having and bring it into focus” seems in many ways a very Maddow thing to say.

They disagreed, at times with great force, about just how evil George Bush really is, the accountability of cable news in polarizing the country, and more. Yet they were throughout it all decent and ungimmicky and relentlessly courteous. It was quite the refreshing novelty. Speaking of his gig as America’s premier fly in the media’s ointment, Stewart declared modestly, “I feel like I am where I belong. There is no honor in what I do but I do it as honorably as I can.” To do anything at all with a self-aware degree of honor is nowadays a rare and extraordinary thing. The execution may not always be flawless and debate may abound, but in a cable television morass of bullies and bigmouths, he and Maddow both prove quiet — but encouragingly bright — beacons of hope.

I thought about my mom and Roberto Clemente sitting high in the grandstands in Arlington, Texas, for Game 4 of the World Series Sunday night, my San Francisco Giants facing the Texas Rangers. I was there with my daughter, and two friends who happen to be Latino, and a whole lot of white Texans. We were decked out in our Giants regalia — my friend’s jersey read “Gigantes” — and I admit I felt a little discomfort. I had no idea how people would treat us walking into George W. Bush’s house, being from the tribe of Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and Gavin Newsom, home of gay marriage and “Let Timmy Smoke” T-shirts. Complicating everything, Bush himself was throwing out the first pitch, and all day I was watching a virtual debate on Twitter and in e-mail between people saying anti-Bush baseball fans had a responsibility to boo the former president, for costing thousands of Iraqis and Americans their lives in a senseless war, and those insisting booing Bush was wrong. I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d do until I did it. 

My fears were silly; the Texas fans were warm and friendly. The ballpark at Arlington is one of those old fashioned complexes surrounded by … nothing. (I’m spoiled by our downtown stadium.) We arrived early, the gates were closed, it was hot, and you couldn’t even purchase water (no street vendors in buttoned-down Arlington, either). When I asked an usher outside if there was anyplace nearby to buy water, she said no, apologetically — and then quickly ran to get me a huge cup of it. Rangers fans volunteered to take my daughter’s and my pictures, told us nice stories about visiting San Francisco, helped us navigate their ballpark. Sure, we heard jokes about gays, the Castro and all the pot smoke at AT&T Park – two straight male friends were greeted as “domestic partners”; my daughter was directed to the (nonexistent) pot-smoking section, but mostly we enjoyed people’s genuine curiosity about our city, and our team. Given that the Giants were already up 2-1 over the Rangers (let alone the Texas-San Francisco divide), you couldn’t take that goodwill for granted. Certainly we wouldn’t have in Dodgers Stadium, despite our blue-state politics.

Maybe that’s why, when President Bush drove onto the field, I didn’t join the small but vocal ranks of people booing (most of them, it seemed, Giants fans scattered in nearby sections). We didn’t boo, but we didn’t clap either; I couldn’t fake a respect I don’t feel, but I could muster respect for the people around me, who were kind to guests in their baseball home. I noticed the friendly guy next to me, who was lustily cheering for Bush, turn and notice that I wasn’t cheering. I smiled and nodded and kept my hands at my sides. We survived. They made a few more jokes about the Castro, where I live; they let my friend remind them that they stole their state from Mexico. (“Wait, wasn’t it part of the Louisiana Purchase?” one said, but I think he was kidding.) They endured us chanting “Let’s go Giants,” even after we took the lead (for good, but you can read game commentary elsewhere). We all sang “Deep in the Heart of Texas” with gusto, and shook hands warmly when we parted, though my team won, 4-0, to put the Rangers on the verge of elimination. I’m not pretending we healed the red-state, blue-state divide, but since I was raised to believe baseball can create small openings that make a big difference, it all made me very happy.

So it was funny that, during my lovely baseball kumbaya weekend, I showed up in the “fear-mongering” montage at the Stewart-Colbert “Rally for Sanity.” I should have thicker skin; it smarted a little. I love Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as much as anyone in the media/political/entertainment complex where we all toil today. But I think their insisting on left-right “equivalence” in the demonization game is a bit dishonest. Supposedly I was shown calling people “gun nuts” (I can’t find the actual montage anywhere; share it if you have it!). But I wasn’t referring to all gun owners as gun nuts; as far as I can tell, I’ve used the term in two cases. Once was referring to William Kostric, the Tea Partier who carried a gun to an Obama rally in Manchester, N.H., in August 2009, who expressed support for birthers, secessionists and shooting cops who arrest drug dealers in their homes. 

And once on “Morning Joe,” I defended Eugene Robinson’s using the term “gun nuts” by pointing to the anti-Obama activists who staged a gun-toting rally in a national park near Washington, D.C., to protest the president’s alleged plans to take away their guns — when in fact it was Obama who signed the law legalizing their carrying guns in a national park. 

I’m sorry, those people are gun nuts. 

As Keith Olbermann noted in real-time on Twitter, the Stewart/Colbert critique of liberals who fight back on cable news amounts to unilateral disarmament, because “The America before today’s cable wasn’t reasonable discussion. It was the 1-sided lockstep of Fox and people afraid of Fox. That got us Iraq.” (Read Will Bunch for one of the best critiques of the “Restore Sanity” approach.) 

But back to baseball. I guess turning up in the fear-monger montage particularly smarted because I also, partly, agree with Stewart and Colbert: Someone’s got to turn down the heat out there, and I actually think of myself as someone who’s tried to do that. Certainly I do in small ways, and I tried Sunday night. I was raised to love baseball at least partly because of its story of (belated) social inclusion. The sport got better when it made room for more people; the teams that resisted integration, like the Boston Red Sox, lagged behind. We have so few things that make us pull together as a team in this country, so few models of what we get from our diversity, I treasure the places we can celebrate being a team. I loved seeing those white Texas fans cheering mightily for Rangers manager Ron Washington, if not quite as loud as for Bush. 

The Giants are on the verge of winning their first World Series in my lifetime in Arlington tonight; I’m back home in San Francisco. [Update: They won it.] Who knows if Texas fans will be as magnanimous if San Francisco wins the championship in their own home. [Update: Looks like they were, but we'll know details Tuesday] (Who knows if I’d have smiled through the gay jokes and pot jabs if my team had been down 2-1?) Still, my weekend in Arlington helped me remember to look for ways to get along with people, not to fight with them. If someone hates San Franciscans a little less because I was friendly, and opted not to boo George W. Bush, maybe I did my part to restore sanity yesterday.

While the rally was still happening, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was criticizing the message on Twitter. Olbermann took Stewart to be arguing that liberals (the ones who watch Stewart) should calm down and stop shouting, which would be a preemptive surrender to still-shouting Republicans.

The New York Times’ David Carr said that the badness of the media is largely irrelevant (an amusingly counterintuitive — or maybe just realist — take from a Timesman).

But here’s the problem: Most Americans don’t watch or pay attention to cable television. In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans. People are scared of what they see in their pay envelopes and neighborhoods, not because of what Keith Olbermann said last night or how Bill O’Reilly came back at him.

“If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” Mr. Stewart said, and then went on to say, “not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate,” he said.

All due respect to Mr. Williams and Mr. Sanchez, not many people know or care who they are.

All of this is fair enough — the number of people who care about the latest outrage du jour from the left or the right is actually absurdly small — but it also lets the media off the hook for their occasional acts of egregious malfeasance. As Hamilton Nolan notes, the media’s problem is less “disagreement” than bubble-ensconced groupthink. I mean, “no one” watches the Sunday shows, but the Sunday shows got us into Iraq. (Civilly and politely, for the most part.)

And how do Americans “learn” that Kenyan-born Barack Obama has already raised all of our taxes? They half-hear something on the news about it, or a friend — who heard it on the radio — tells them, or whatever. The media is how people learn about the nation, even if it’s passively and without paying much attention, so a media that doesn’t police lying and misinformation — and a media that constantly fear-mongers or that presents every single issue as an intractable argument between two immovable forces — certainly does hurt us all.

Talk radio and bad cable news can also have a radicalizing effect on their audiences, turning regular Republicans into raging ultra-conservatives in a way that Fox’s liberal analogues (that means the New York Times and NPR, not really MSNBC) do not. And anyone who watches Fox all day and takes it seriously is being fed a steady stream of bonkers conspiracy theories and outright misinformation. (Except when Shep is on.)

So Jon Stewart’s stated goals — civility and niceness! — did sorta force him to let the real offenders off the hook. His critique of propaganda got wrapped up in a different attack on a nonpartisan press that “reports” on media-created stories and rewards horrible behavior with attention. And the producers of the rally went really heavy on MSNBC’s liberal programming in their montages of media misbehavior — probably in part because they’re more sympathetic to the politics, and so they find the occasional lapses into hysteria more grating.

(Though some of it was just because they needed to find examples of “both sides” doing it. Bringing a gun to a right-wing political rally is obviously much, much nuttier than calling that person a gun nut — as our Joan Walsh was shown doing in a rally montage cameo.)

But anyone attempting to attract a partisan audience — Fox or Rush or MSNBC or liberal blogs or Paul Krugman — scaremongers. They do it for the same reason local news teases something in your medicine cabinet that could kill your child: It gets people watching and keeps them from turning the channel. (And, to be fair, scaremongers often think they’re just responsibly warning people about a very real threat, whether that threat is Islamic terror, trans fats or Sharron Angle.)

So yeah, Stewart’s speech wasn’t a fair reflection of the media landscape. Jon Stewart’s job involves watching cable news all day, every day. Anyone who does that comes away with a pretty bent view of the national mood.

This sucks, I thought.

It all began, of course, when Arianna Huffington appeared on “The Daily Show” last month and announced, apparently on impulse, that the Huffington Post was giving away free rides to the Comedy Central-sponsored rally. “Just come to the Huffingtonne Post, 560 Broadway in SoHo. The bahss will be there. We’ll take you with us,” she said regally, beckoning to the audience. “We have as many bahsses as there are people to fill them.” HuffPo staff heard about the gesture at approximately the same time as the rest of us. (“Arianna’s $250K Bus to Jon Stewart Rally a ‘Shock’ at HuffPo HQ,” read a headline at The Wrap.)

I could have taken a Chinatown bus or gotten a ride to the rally with friends, but the HuffPo Sanity Bus sounded like an adventure. And it was free.

But you know that old saying about a free ride? Yeah, there’s wisdom there. The trip was something of a bait-and-switch: The buses would not be boarding in trendy downtown SoHo, but at Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens at 5:30 a.m. — meaning lefties shlepping from Midtown, like me, would have to leave home by 4:30 a.m., those coming from Brooklyn, 3:30. Some suspected the venue and punishing schedule were designed to whittle down the freeloaders. As my friend Christina put it in her excellent Arianna impression, “We weel leaf from Floshing at five in the mahrning, and that way, all the heepsters will be too hahngover to wake up.”

I’ll admit it, that was almost me. But my mood lifted once I got to the subway station. The rally-goers were obvious: They looked like students headed on a field trip, carrying backpacks and provisions and acting giddy. Many of them actually were college kids from New York University, carrying signs that said things like, “THIS IS A SIGN LOL,” and on the back, “Follow me on Twitter!”

“Are you going to the rally?” everyone kept asking each other, even though the rally-goers outnumbered the other commuters by about 200 to 1.

“What about you, are you going to the rally?” I asked a well-bundled couple as they stepped onto the train. They were. We commiserated about not being asleep.

“Maybe the Huffington Post will have coffee and donuts,” said the boyfriend, who later introduced himself as Tyler.

This was an oft-repeated fantasy, though it turned out to be ridiculous. So did the dreams of gift bags and free yogurt, suggested by Tyler’s girlfriend Megan, and the notions that there would be cheers or sing-a-longs or mandatory consumer surveys. Once the hordes poured out of the train in Queens and congealed into a massive queue around Shea Stadium, it became apparent that the Huffington Post was not prepared to give us anything beyond a bus ride. And even that seemed far from certain.

The Huffington Post itself described the scene as “organized chaos,” which was one way to put it; “insufferably frustrating” would be another. Authority figures were scarce, lines doubled back on themselves, and from where I was standing there appeared to be just two people checking thousands of IDs. It was dark, it was 40 degrees, and my cohort had been shuffling forward three steps at a time for two hours before we reached the buses. The bus I boarded left at 7:15, well past the 6:00 a.m. departure advertised.

As a Huffington Poster allocating the leftover single seats on our bus said, “Sorry you can’t sit with your friends. But it’s free. That’s a good thing!”

“Woo, free!” the guy in front of me yelled.

I fell asleep as soon as we started moving but woke up one hour later, as the bus crawled along in traffic in New Jersey. The jam didn’t last long, but it was clear we weren’t going to make it to D.C. in time for the opening of the rally at noon. When our driver unhurriedly pulled into a rest stop to use the bathroom and charge another driver’s phone, no one complained. We hadn’t paid for this, after all. And we wanted Starbucks.

Jon Stewart was already on stage by the time we pulled into the parking lot across from the Navy Yard Metro Station in Southeast D.C. – and we were still three subway stops away from the Mall. I got the news about Stewart via text message and made the mistake of reading it out loud, earning me the ire of the fanboys sitting in front of me who carried a sign with Stewart’s picture and spent the trip quoting the “The Daily Show.”

“Welcome to the Rally to Restore Sanity, from Arianna Huffington!” a HuffPoster said over a bullhorn as we disembarked from the bus. It was 1:10 p.m. and the Metro station we were squeezing into was already packed.

Most riders I talked to were a little miffed. They’d shown up in Queens before dawn and now the Sanity Bus had made them an hour late for a three-hour event. The oversight surely cost Huffington Post some Facebook fans. And it rankled a bit that the headlines on the site – “Huffington Post Sanity Buses bring 10,000 People to DC for Rally” — contradicted the updates on Twitter, like this one from @robgwilson: “Listening to the Rally For Sanity on the radio while the bus is stuck in traffic. #rally4sanity FTW #huffpost #sanitybus FAIL” and this one from @abbyohlheiser at 2 p.m.: “#sanitybus was insanely late. just arriving at rally now.”

“Our driver got lost,” one rider vented to me as we speed-walked to the train. “I was using the GPS on my phone to give him directions.”

But the Metro train arrived fairly quickly. I got out at Federal Center SW, where a Metro employee had realized it made more sense to shout “LEFT ON INDEPENDENCE. RIGHT ON SEVENTH. LEFT ON INDEPENDENCE. RIGHT ON SEVENTH,” than try to give directions to every individual who asked.

As I headed down Independence, I heard someone behind me griping about arriving late. I turned around and discovered Tyler and Megan from my morning train. Their driver, who claimed it was his first day driving a bus, had missed an exit twice after driving through the middle of a three-car accident early in the trip.

“I actually wish we had gotten in a little fender-bender,” Tyler said. “Then we’d still be in New York.”

Just then I heard a roar of applause, so I said goodbye to Megan and Tyler and picked up my pace. “Enjoy your 12 minutes in DC!” Tyler called.

The crowd was thick and nobody with a view was willing to give up a spot. Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow had apparently just taken the stage for a duet I could hardly hear, so I gave up and started walking around – there was plenty to look at between the Halloween costumes and the signs (“I have an opinion about our nation’s progress and I would like to discuss that with you civilly,” “i like cats,” and of course, “LEGALIZE IT”). And despite the long wait at the Porta Potties, people were in a good mood. They said sorry when they bumped into you.

I was in a good mood, too, even though I basically missed the rally after traveling for more than eight hours. All the grumbling I heard was in line with the rally’s theme – “keep calm and carry on” – and much of it was borderline good-natured. To be fair, 80 buses had left before I boarded mine, so there must have been some rally goers who arrived at the National Mall on time. In the end, a relatively expedient shuttle took people to our nation’s capital to enjoy the fringes of an exciting rally, and returned those people to New York City in time for an early Halloween celebration on Saturday night.

Woo, free!

On a flawless autumn afternoon at the nation’s capitol, a crowd that “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart fancifully referred to as “10 million” strong came together to declare their allegiance to one nation under reason, good manners, respectful disagreement. What they — and we the viewers at home — got was an odd mix of Comedy Central fake news shenanigans and deeply passionate rhetoric. It didn’t always work perfectly, but then, the American dream rarely does.

Ever since the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was announced in September, plenty of people have been mulling what the heck such an event would entail and what it could hope to accomplish. Along the way, many have wondered if Stewart, Colbert and the whole caboodle have essentially jumped the shark.

The answer is no, they haven’t. But they have passed the rubicon. They are in a place now where these two jokesters, who’ve already been powerfully influential in articulating the exasperated sentiment of the courteously silent majority for years, are now officially the faces of Standing for Something. Something That Isn’t Totally Bananas.

The show/rally/event itself was an uneven affair, with Comedy Central devoting the first 40 minutes to the quasi warm-up performance by The Roots and John Legend. Sure, everybody loves a sousaphone jam, but as the televised event crept toward the one-hour mark, watches were glanced at, sandwiches were made. And when “Mythbusters” hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman led world’s largest/least-interesting-to-watch-at-home version of the wave, it seemed the thing was spinning its own wheels — and hard. But then, when they coaxed the crowd into a rousing, synchronized jump, the point of the day began to reveal itself. When we move together, you see, we can literally create a groundswell. Or at least the quantifiable impact of a minor car crash.

A day built around the taking down of notches is not necessarily going to be a day with a high wow factor, and indeed, Jon Stewart’s low-key, almost professorial official introduction was no “Are you ready to rock?” Thank heaven, then, for Stephen Colbert. Emerging from a “Fear Bunker” in a tube fit for a trapped miner and chanting, “Chi-le! Chi-le!” Colbert, clad in a patriotic Evil Knievel-esque ensemble, instantly provided the clowny yin and/or yang to Stewart’s earnestness. And when he threatened to restore fear to the crowd with the only thing more terrifying than a shoe-brandishing terrorist — a swarm of peanut-butter-covered bees – it was the long-awaited first belly laugh of the day.

The most spectacularly memorable bit of the event came far too early, but it was still one for the books. It would have been enough had it ended with Stewart bringing out Yusuf, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, to lead a lilting rendition of “Peace Train.” But the ante upped when Colbert had the audacity to cut him off to trot out Ozzy Osbourne to thoroughly bring it with everyone’s favorite ringtone for their designated lunatic, “Crazy Train.” But then something truly amazing happened. Stewart cut the action off again, and somewhere in the distance, the sound of “People all over the world …” was heard. It was the O’Jays, a little vocally worse for the wear but bedazzled and funky as ever, to finish off the greatest train-song medley trifecta in recorded history. “Love Train” was a punchline, yes. But if you didn’t feel a lump in your throat watching thousands of Americans on the Mall soulfully command us to join hands, then I feel sorry, sorry for you. That sweet, funny moment was what the day was about. My fellow Americans, if we don’t have love, we’ve got zip.

There were other highlights, like famed tantrum throwers Steven Slater and “Real Housewives’” Teresa Giudice in prerecorded messages pleading for good behavior. Stewart and Colbert presented their respective awards for reasonableness and fear-mongering – including Colbert’s hilariously disgusted shout-out to the news organizations that banned their employees from attending. “Oh no! People might think NPR is liberal!” he crowed, before handing the prize to a 7-year-old little girl for exhibiting more bravery than the stalwart of the airwaves.

It’s no mean feat to pull together a semi-sincere event and a three-hour live telecast, and the Rally was not without its numerous slow moments. Tim Meadows’s P. K. Winsome routine was agonizing, most of “The Daily Show’s” news team’s bantered bits with the crowd felt wildly flat, Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow were uninspired, and if we never hear another Stewart-Colbert duet about the “greatest, strongest country in the world,” it will be far too soon.

But when Stewart and Colbert took their podiums for a mock debate, the message began to come back into focus. Stewart astutely pointed out that we can’t condemn all Muslims when “There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world,” but the point really resonated when he trotted out beloved basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to bring it home. Is Roger Murdock a terrorist? Then shut up, haters. Colbert then mock countered by unleashing a giant, Colbert-shaped “Fearzilla” to unveil a brilliantly terrible montage of mainstream media fearmongering. Suffice to say, the phrase “in YOUR town” featured heavily. Lessons learned from the Rally: Both your flip-flops and your television remote are trying to keeeeeeeell you.

Close to the end, Stewart, ever the more gravitas-endowed, came out alone to do the hardest work of the day – to tell the crowd and the viewers what the hell they were all doing here. Well, sort of. “I’m happy you guys are here,” he said, “even if none of us are quite sure why we’re here.” And he announced, encouragingly enough to be convincing, that “We live in hard times, not end times.” It was a welcome reminder of the distinction.

What this crazy, not entirely well-thought out, quasi-free-for-all was about, it turns out, was we, the people. The proud, generous, spirited, non-yelling and non-bullying real Americans who know that “If we amplify everything we hear nothing.” Having 4Troops perform the national anthem and Tony Bennet belt out “America, the Beautiful” was not irony. Even Father Guido’s rambling benediction that ended with a “Thank you, and we really mean it,” was sincere. Because the ultimate metaphor for who we are, in the competent words of Stewart, is our nightmarishly daily, eminently Yankee commute. The NRA members and the Obama voters. The soccer moms and the immigrants. And somehow we all generally merge into one harmonious lane. It’s true that as Stewart explained, “Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. It’s just New Jersey.” But when we practice compassion and community, when we remember that the loudmouths are not a true picture of who we are, we can heal a nation, fly to the moon, and even get to work on time.

Was Saturday the beginning of a new dawn in the American character? Did it cure hysteria, paranoia and rampant jerkwaddery? Only time will tell, but don’t hold your breath. Maybe it was nothing more than a comedic stunt. Maybe it was just a helpful reminder to, as one genius sign in the crowd implored, “Make awkward sexual advances, not war.” But when Mavis Staples and the entire ensemble gathered for the finale to promise “I’ll Take You There,” it seemed, at least for a minute, something more. It was a message to the world that we are not the sum of our loudest, angriest parts. That most of our hearts, broken and aching and cynical and flawed though they often are, are in the right place. Oh, mercy. Mercy indeed. And though the rally may be over, the Peace Crazy Love Train is still at the station. The only question left is: Are you on board?

The Republican midterm strategy is based on anger and resentment. A celebration of the idea that basically everyone’s pretty OK at heart is a pretty liberal message. Some of the comedy (most of it involving Stephen Colbert) was explicitly against Republican midterm fear-mongering campaigns involving the demonization of Islam — like bringing on Yusef Islam and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to drive home the apparently controversial point that Muslims are nice, pleasant people.

Stewart’s final monologue — his serious, Mr. Smith moment — was less a political message than an extended bit of media criticism. It was a sequel, really to his famous “Crossfire” appearance. 24-hour media doesn’t cause problems, Stewart argued, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The mainstream press has been this rally’s greatest critic (Stewart’s too political/too naive/too serious/hurting his “brand”) and they ended up being — much more than, say, Glenn Beck — its biggest target. The nonpartisan establishment press is a thousand times more cynical than Stewart the irony-drenched comedian, and that’s in part why they hate it when he gets “preachy.”

“The only place people don’t work together to get things done,” Stewart said, “is here,” gesturing to the Capitol, “and on cable TV.”

The metaphor Stewart used to prove his point about the essential reasonableness of the American people? Cars merging into single lanes to enter tunnels. Trust me, it actually worked. (Though perhaps it works better if you live on the eastern seaboard, and drive.)

What about the guys who drive up the shoulder and try to cut in at the last possible second? “That individual is rare, and scorned, and not hired as an analyst.“

While there will be plenty of (completely reasonable) disagreement about this rally’s goals and whether it helped or hurt the progressive cause (and whether or not anyone involved even had a responsibility to help the progressive cause), there’s already been a bit of aggressive point-missing by a couple liberal critics. (One recurring topic among disgruntled progressives on Twitter: MoveOn’s urgent need for phone-bankers. As if, if it weren’t for this annoying rally, these hundreds of thousands of people would’ve spent the weekend before Halloween canvassing.) Stewart occasionally preaches Broderian false equivalence, and it’s easily his most annoying trait, but while the Broders beg for a Serious Grownup to rescue idiot Americans from their own passions, Stewart’s message is basically that all Americans have the ability to just not be assholes, and the press has a responsibility to not reward being an asshole.

(The only actual moment where everyone’s worst fears about the event came true was the horrible Kid Rock song about how influential millionaires can’t do anything to make the world a better place besides care, a bunch, about war and stuff.)

As a piece of politicking, the Rally to Restore Sanity got a couple hundred thousand young liberals excited about sincerity and inspired about their nation on the eve of the midterm elections. I can’t really see a downside, unless you think tepid criticisms of MSNBC’s tone will convince liberals not to vote this Tuesday.