The Din of a Million Starlings

In the shadow cast by the SCOTUS McCutcheon decision, let’s discuss the futility of the unimportant opinion. The sheer vanity inherent in the expression of an idea in a world where everyone is shouting into the same dark cave and only the stupidest and loudest are heard.

(Clears throat, pauses… and begins.)

Twitter: Millions of starlings on a telephone wire, all screaming as starlings will scream. No matter how much an individual starling cares, really cares what he is screaming about, all anyone can hear is the din of a million starlings.

Facebook: Millions of people screaming into the same deep, black hole that everyone else is screaming into. All anyone can do is add to the cacophony. But it feels so good to scream.

Blogs: Pouring your cup of stupid into the same ocean of stupidity into which every idiot with a computer has already poured a billion gallons.

Writing for publication: Millions of sperm with the same genetic code scrambling over each other to be the first to penetrate the ovum. Because after one gets in, the other millions have nothing left to do but die.

We live in an age where ideas are milk and mundanity rises to the top like cream.

You think you have a new idea? You do not. It’s been thought of. It’s been done. Nobody cares.

But if you have the money to do it, if your idea is stupid enough and soaked in the cream of the mundane, you can write a book about vampires and the girls who love them who also love werewolves and nobody has sex because it would spoil the purity of the narrative as long as it’s already been done successfully by someone else who had the money to make somebody care enough.

Watch and see over the next few years how many new ideas will spring up out of nowhere about teenagers having to fight to the death for meager scraps when Stephen King did the same thing as Richard Bachman when he wrote “The Long Walk” in 1979.

We’re seeing remakes of movies that were remade before and were remade before that. Russell Crowe plays “Noah” and the commercial says, “He’s unlike any other Noah you’ve ever seen.”

People want new, but they want it to be familiar. That explains the last two decades of Broadway. It used to be you hummed the tunes on your way out of the theater. Now, if you don’t already know the tunes by heart, the musical doesn’t get made.

People want to feel smart, but they don’t want to think. TMZ and other “celebrinews” sites make them feel “in the know” while adding nothing to the collective intelligence.

Idea for new show: Dancing with Vampires. No?

Got a movie about talking chipmunks who sing pop songs that you’ve never heard of if you’re over 40? A book that will delight the eye without engaging the brain? A song with a good beat that you can dance to with lyrics that would make your grandmother’s ears erupt into bloody spouts, one that sounds like every other song done in the last two years? Sign here. You’re a celebrity now. People care about what you say, what you think, what you wear, what you eat, what you drink, where you go for rehab and will cry like they knew you personally when you die before your time because you couldn’t handle it without chemicals and they will photograph your naked body on the slab and sell it to the National Colonoscope as they cluck and giggle over the bruises and scrapes and needle tracks and scars you adorned yourself with in your wonderfully short and glamorous life.

You got some of that stuff for us? Great.

Otherwise, get your feathered ass back on the wire.

So… at the end of the day… who is the bigger fool?

The starling who decides to shut his beak forever and drops from the wire to be fought over by cats? Or the starling with the dry throat, the sore and stiff wings, the cracked beak and the heavy heart that still wants to sing and chooses to do so, even though all the world will ever hear is the din of a million starlings on a telephone wire?

As stupid as it sounds?

We believe we’ll choose the latter.

There. Now we feel better. Now, if we could just hear a TV news anchor ask this question to an obviously lying spokesperson…

“Before we let you go, would you explain to us how you are able to lie so easily, so effortlessly, without your mouth completely exploding into a fountain of blood, bits of bone and flesh?”

By: Bill Schmalfeldt

I no longer use Twitter or Facebook because they are evil. I do continue to blog at http://Schmalfeldt.org, where you can get information about other stuff I do, like comedy/parody CDs and MP3 downloads and audiobooks and such. Get yours now. When I'm dead, there will be a drastic price increase.