While the adults talked of adult things, the children met up with their cast-off flutes and their patched drums. They played songs together, or that was how they thought of it, and those unskilled sounds brought a man who heard them to reminisce.
"Long ago, in Palthea, they banned music and dancing. Did you ever hear about that?"
The other adults admitted they had never known that about Palthea, and therefore he elaborated for them. "They banned it back when, oh, must have been when Turer IV was alive. He succeeded his uncle who was known as a bit of a, well, there was a public appetite for finer morals after that. There was a whole downpour of new restrictions and such. Anything sounded good to people as long as it sounded likely to make someone less happy.
"Most of them were pulled back in the years and decades following, when people got to thinking they had overdone it, but the prohibitions on music and dance stayed. You'd never have recognized it as a human country if you'd seen it. Not a single instrument, not a voice raised a pure expression of joy.
"Well, the consequences couldn't be avoided for long. Palthea became the best governed country there was. It surged ahead in philosophy, in science, in history, and economics. They had long conversations and spoke in paragraphs with subordinate clauses. They didn't try to speak in lyrics, like they hoped to write the next big hit. Didn't have much time for putting things all emotional, either. Just communication and reason. Pretty soon, Palthea was the greatest country in the world. If you ever wondered why we're nothing but a dependent on Palthea's good will, well, you can stop wondering about it now."
"Maybe we should ban music too."
"Maybe we should. Maybe we should have done that a long time ago." The adults looked at the children, who were just getting into an argument about what song they should mangle, and they thought a lot of new things.
Finis
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