CBS News said that about 87,000 stopped by the Lincoln Memorial to take in the Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin roadshow. Palin pegged the number at 100,000. Beck opined that perhaps 350,000 to 600,000 showed up. And Michele Bachmann, a congressional representative from Minnesota with whose relationship with reality is often tenuous, claimed more than a million.

Who cares?

A lot of fat white people showed up on the mall to hear Beck, Palin and others talk. What were they doing? I dunno. I didn't watch any of the coverage. My older son and I went biking along the Anacostia, well away from any fray. But from what I read, Beck called on God to "take back America" (a phrase that makes the movie Bob Roberts that much more prescient) and to bless our armed forces. Palin said something about God, country, being forced to feel shame for marrying a veteran and why you shouldn't let your daughters consort with morons. And then there were some other folks who said some more stuff along those same lines.

Was this event as important as the 1963 March on Washington? Of course not. That march was about the right of all Americans to have the same rights. This rally seems to have been about the right of all Americans to believe in God and to shoot guns. I'm pretty sure both of those rights are right at the top of the Bill of Rights.

So why are these people pissed off? For starters, the economy is bad. And that pisses me off, too. Our family took a serious pay cut last year, even as our rent and other expenses went up. That blows. Is it the fault of the Prez? Not really. It's not even the fault of the ex-Prez. There are certain policies that can help or hinder the economy, but past all that there is one major truth: When rich people decide to go whole hog back into investing in new businesses, the recession will be an ancient memory. Until then, we're at the mercy of corporations (who tend to be profit-driven, damn them!) and banks (ditto) and everyone who relies on corporations and banks (still ditto, for the most part).

The lugubrious nineties were fueled by wads of cash stuffed into every possible dot-com hole by rich folks hoping to get richer. Remember that E-Trade ad with the guy lying on a gurney in the hospital because he had "money coming out the wazoo"? When that sort of thing starts happening again, happy days will be here.

But that ain't happening any time soon.

I say let's get all Republican and take some personal responsibility. Instead of lobbying for tax breaks, we should lobby for tax increases. We gotta pay the debt off, right? And then every single able-bodied person should go out and work two jobs. With the money from the second job, each of us should start a business on the side in order to reduce the unemployment rate. There are only 168 hours in a week, but with pharmaceutical help most of us could handle that sort of workload.

Yeah, right. The problem is that "fixing" the economy is a lot more complicated than the impossible scenario I just described. The economy will turn around, because human beings are (somewhat irrationally) an optimistic sort, and at some point the folks holding the purse strings will decide that it's time to start spending again. After all, you have to spend money to make money.

But what of all this anger against our supposed Muslim socialist Prez? It's mostly demagoguery. I mean, it is true that the Prez is modestly more liberal than the previous occupant of the White House. But he's no raving radical like the Prez who proposed wage and price controls in a misguided attempt to get a handle on inflation. You know, Richard Nixon, the well-known communist. And (so far), no one has accused the Prez of paying off Iran, like Ronald Reagan, the well-known terrorist sympathizer, did.

Presidents rarely make decisions based solely on how the political winds are blowing. They make the best decisions that they are capable of making given the information they have. Presidents fuck up. A lot. But sometimes presidents learn from the mistakes of the past. It took us seven years to (mostly) get out of Iraq. It took ten years for us to get out of Vietnam after the post-Gulf of Tonkin ramp up. Three years may not seem like a big improvement, but the soldiers and Iraqis who don't die might beg to differ.

What truly doesn't matter how many people showed up at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday. Louis Farrakhan got a few hundred thousand folks on the Mall back in 1995. Today, it's easier to pick up a copy of the latest Public Enemy album (2007's How Do You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?) than it is to find out what that Honorable Minister is up to these days. This white-bread anger, too, shall pass. The numbers of white folks who fear a truly pluralistic American society dwindle by the day. And given the girth of the people I saw in pix from the rally, those numbers should be dropping even faster in years to come.

But I'm not going to worry about that. I'm certainly not going to wish for anyone to die. That's stupid. I'm just gonna live my own life and try not to blame my problems on somebody else. It's like that old Rocket Summer song: "What we hate, we make."

Jon Worley would like to make some serious barbecue--without hating the pig.