The Laws of a Year of Blessed Silence

by Richard Rushfield

In humanity’s last year of existence, the people of Planet Earth finally achieved the goal that had eluded them since the dawn of civilization, that prize that since men first gathered around fires had hung like a Holy Grail just beyond reach their reach. With one year left to live, mankind at last learned how to shut the hell up.

For centuries, from the earliest known communities through medieval times until the mid 90’s, the free exchange of human ideas had seemed a manageable annoyance; like cockroaches in high tech office towers, the specter of people sharing their thoughts was disgusting to look at, but relatively harmless. To many, the constant yammer was a necessary humbling reminder that, like the cockroaches, for all our pretensions to advanced evolutionary status, we are creatures of the raw and remorseless soil.

And so it might have remained had it not been for the sudden appearance towards the end of the last century of the three horsemen of the apocalypse; talk radio, cable news and blogs.

Like an advanced mining technique unveiling hidden motherlodes, the three horsemen suddenly revealed opinions were hiding everywhere. What had been a manageable annoyance became a vast flood, sweeping away all before it and drowning good people in a sea of blabbing.

Suddenly people were forced to listen to the average citizen’s opinions on politics, on culture and celebrities, on how neighborhoods had become “generic” and on how band’s latest albums had lost their edge.

It became clear to all that the first amendment had been a terrible mistake. But how to get rid of it? With streets overflowing with blather, there seemed no way to turn the tide.

And thus, when the word came down that Earth would explode in one year’s time, the news was taken by many as a blessing. For one thing, it would make it very hard for people to corner you at a party and tell you why Frank Rich’s column this week was on the money if there was no planet for them to stand on while they were saying it. And for another, in the past years the question of how to repeal the first amendment had occupied and befuddled the nation’s greatest minds, between them failing to find a way through and their debate on the issue ironically only adding to the chatter. But with the news that the world was doomed, they all got together and said, oh what the hell, let’s just do it.

And so they did.

However, with the genies of blogging and cable TV out of the bottle, they were not to be shoved back inside so easily. And cooler heads prevailed over those who suggested we should just shoot those who opened their big yaps. Instead, more progressive minds instituted a regimen of laws designed to reacclimatize people to the lost art of shutting their traps now and then.

The following laws were instituted and by mid-year, once again a long forgotten hush fell over the land:

• People were still permitted to express opinions on politics but only on the condition that they do so wearing a red curly hair wig and giant red nose, which they would honk at the end of every sentence.

• If one expressed one’s self at the dinner table, that person was required to sit in silence as each member of the party in turn shared what they thought of their brilliant insight that if only Obama would say X, then the Republicans would be forced to do Y and that would lead to Z. The big mouth would also be barred from responding as each member explained exactly how enthralling it had been for them to listen to his opinions all those years.

• Every opinion a person expressed would be recorded, the tape of which they would be forced to listen back to a hundred times straight.

• Whenever a person announced their discovery of a previously unknown band or neighborhood, all their parents’ friends would immediately buy every album and declare they had always been into them, or move to said neighborhood.

As a result of these changes, the people of Planet Earth found peace and contentment in their final days and declared they wanted it never to end, as opposed to a year earlier when they had spent every dinner with friends praying for a quick death.

And as the inventor of these laws, none of them applied to Richard Rushfield.

Richard Rushfield is the preeminent ‘American Idol’ scholar of our time, and author of the forthcoming Hyperion book ‘American Idol: The Last Empire.’ He is also the author of ‘Don’t Follow Me I’m Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the ‘80s.’