possible to hear them. We squish our way past a Thai food stand, then get stuck next to an earsplitting generator. At this point, we can glimpse, barely, one of the giant video screens. Is this worth it? I ask. “Yeah, I guess,” Varlashkin responds
weakly. “This is stressful,” Rozenberg says. By 2 p.m., the “miners” are calling it
quits. “Back to the mine! Out of the way!”
Varlashkin shouts, jauntily waving his cat sign. The friendly crowd, still nod- ding or clapping as the miners pass, lets them squeeze through back to Seventh Street, where a growing number of peo- ple who likewise cannot hear or see are making their way toward Metro Center and any restaurant along the way. Still somewhat upbeat, the quartet
splits; Rozenberg and Dabrowski head off to visit friends at George Washington University, while Rudoy and Varlashkin
walk all the way back to the buses, where most fellow passengers report that they, too, saw very little of the actual rally. One passenger, I later learned, got
close to the action by finding a spot be- hind the stage, where he could watch celebrities coming and going. Jeff Sil- berman, 51, a data center solutions architect from San Jose, Calif., was ebullient about the “civility, moderation and fun” he sensed on the Mall. “We felt compelled to be here, even if
we didn’t know why or what for,” he said of the crowd. “We all had a message, without knowing what it was.” The rally, he said, was “our collective
moment of Zen.” h
Three days after the rally — and after calming down her father, who found out she had gone to the gather- ing — Anna Rozenberg’s vote helped Democrat Andrew Cuomo defeat Tea
Party candidate Carl Paladino for New York governor. Being in Washington, she said, “got me more excited about politics again.” Dabrowski, her boyfriend, also voted
Democratic, “but it didn’t seem to do anything,” he mourned. The rally felt aimless to him. “I thought it’d serve a political purpose,” he said. “But I’m not sure what purpose it served, if anything.” Varlashkin, the non-citizen, was
pleased that the rally got people talking and didn’t seem at all perturbed by the dissonance of the experience. “It’s basic nihilism,” he told me. “A
joke within a joke. The whole situation was a joke. Us being there was the joke. “Or maybe,” he said, “a satire.”
Julia Duin, whose most recent book is “Days of Fire and Glory,” is a religion writer based in Maryland. She can be reached at
wpmagazine@washpost.com.
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