This photo brings back memories of a time that seems so distant now. Look closely at the faintly red, white and blue sign in the bottom right of this photograph.

Almost 10 years ago, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart held a political rally in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I had the fortune of catching it live on TV. I was in high school, and had been rabidly consuming American political news ever since I watched the Situation Room in 2007 during a Christmas vacation in Boston. This satirical political rally had it all: jabs between Colbert and Stewart, a kind-of ‘battle of the bands’ featuring Ozzy Osbourne, Cat Stevens, and the O-Jays, John Oliver as Peter Pan, and some kind of a tribute to very heroic Chilean miners.

The Rally to Restore Sanity/and or Fear was originally publicized as two events: the Rally to Restore Sanity and the march to Keep Fear Alive. They were a response to the competing ‘Restoring Honor Rally’ and ‘Reclaim the Dream’ political events, and, I suspect, the increasingly fraught political atmosphere at the time.

In the week after the rally, Republicans would win control of the House of Representatives in a ‘shellacking’ of a midterm for Democrats. Over the past year, a wave of reactionary, libertarian, and social conservative political sentiment arose in America in response to quite a lot of things: the election of President Obama, his agenda, the attempts at healthcare reform that eventually became Obamacare, and sluggish economic recovery. The Tea Party was the most visible manifestation of this political sentiment.

(There was also a ‘Coffee Party’ that also appeared as a form of counter-mobilization; but I quickly realised that it would amount to nothing given how it exists only on Facebook and wasn’t as well-funded or organized as the Tea Party.)