In Salem’s Lot and Needful Things, two tiny cities in Maine are completely destroyed and deserted. I say small cities, not one horse towns. Each has its car dealers, it police force, its library, its own schools.

What seems not to be noticed is that both towns were destroyed in a supernatural catastrophe. One becomes the abode of vampires and its town exit removed.

But afterwards, there is no real puzzle about their obliteration. Small cities are wasting away in New England all the time.

But what fascinates me is how they were forgotten and never investigated.

And, though he says it many times in other ways, King did include on sentence in the midst of the whole thing that really sums it up “It didn’t happen in New York or Boston…”

And that, boys and girls, is the Silence. King doesn’t apply it to politics, but it is everywhere. There was no Enron crisis. The thing just didn’t exist.

A wildly rich guy who got caught a few years ago for simply taking people’s entire life savings destroying one person after another. He was a Psychopath. When he was finally arrested, his statement to the arresting officers was, “What took you so LONG?”

He had pocketed and spent the money old people gave him. Like Ponzi of the Ponzi Scheme, he didn’t skip town in the YEARS that he invested nothing.

King simply wrote his books about the disappearance of the entire population of two towns and readers really had no difficulty believing it.

Media stars routinely referred to the entirety of the United States between New York and Los Angeles as “flyover country.”

These are the kinds of people who write our history and who represent expert opinion on politics.

One point King and his tens of millions of readers took for granted to the point of not asking about it was that those who report our news, determine our politics, and write our news are provincial to a level that even the most inbred hick could possibly imagine.