What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate
One of the great things about God wiping the whole world out with a flood (Note: see Jars of Clay or Steve Carrell for more info on this) was that you didn’t have to travel cross-country to see your crew anymore. I mean, I love a road trip as much as the next guy who just finished On The Road, but sometimes I don’t feel like sitting in a Jeep Grand Cherokee for 15 hours just to watch my bro get hitched to some broad I don’t even know, you know what I’m saying? Sure you do.
The flood solved this problem. For starters, most of your bros would have been dead. Yeah dude, it sucks, I know. Let’s pour one out for our lost homies. Whoa, whoa, whoa not too much, dude! Geez bro, Boone’s Farm doesn’t grow on trees you know. So anyway, yeah, a buncha your boys bit the dust. That’s a real banger. But the good news is: the bros who hadn’t died all lived within walking distance.
See, after the flood, Noah’s grandkids kinda skipped over the whole “fill the earth” part of God’s command. They treated the Middle East like it was a Chicago suburb: they walked until they came to a place where there wasn’t a house and then they built one there. This made for some killer block parties and you never had to go far to find an above ground pool, but it wasn’t how God meant for people to live.
Something else you should know about the post-flood populace: they all spoke the same language. The Bible doesn’t tell us what language, but it was probably English since it’s the easiest. This setup worked out great for everyone since it made it a ton easier to give instructions to the lawn guys, order chicken chow mein, and do other multi-cultural stuff like that. Also, the lines at the DMV moved way faster.
With so many people living in the same place, speaking the same language, and watching the same randomly-hot local news weather lady, it wasn’t long before someone decided they use their combined powers to do something crazy. Now if it had been me I would have said, “let’s invade China” or “let’s elect the first black president” or some other silly thing like that. You know, some stunt that only works if you have a whole bunch of poor people speaking the same language. But these people were a bit more practical than that. So they decided to build a skyscraper to heaven.
The idea was, “if we build the tallest building in the world, we could probably talk Travis Pastrana into parachuting off of it. That’ll turn into a Red Bull commercial and at least 4 million hits on YouTube. We’ll be famous!”
“Plus,” someone else added. “If we’re all working on the skyscraper project, no one will ever want to go to college out of state, and we’ll be one big happy family forever and ever.”
So they got after it. Bricks were baked. Mortar was mixed. Lunches were packed and mustaches were grown. Quicker than you can say “Hola mamasita” downtown Babel was overrun with Mexicans and racist high school dropouts, and it started to look like a real construction site. Scaffolding, backhoes, union bosses, beer guts – it could’ve been a jobsite down the street from my place; the only difference being that no one was speaking Spanish so it was easier for the guys to tell dirty stories about their common-law wives and/or live-in girlfriends.
The whole “same language thing” also made it a ton easier to get stuff done around the site. Since no one was wasting time looking for an English speaker or miming instructions using hand puppets, the skyscraper started coming together so fast you’d have thought it was a montage from an 80s movie. The skyscraper was halfway there (“waaoooh, living on a prayer”) after only a couple weeks of construction.
Round about this time God was rolling though the region and he noticed something fishy going on over in Babel. When he saw the building, he got downright surly.
“You kidding me with this?!” he said to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. “We gotta do something about this. Today they’re climbing a stairway to heaven. Tomorrow they’ll be, I don’t know, landing on the moon? Where will it end? Mars? The sun? Infinity and beyond? No. We’ve gotta put an end to this. Let’s go mess with the way they talk.”
Right when he was saying this, there was a conversation going on down at the jobsite that went something like this:
Foreman: Hey, Jorge, run this stack of drywall up to the fourth floor.
Jorge: Que?
Foreman: What?
Jorge: Que?
Foreman: Take this drywall upstairs.
Jorge: No hablo ingles.
Foreman: What?
Jorge: Que?
And the same thing was happening all over Babel. One minute two guys were laughing at a joke about a Jewish gynecologist and the next they were shouting at each other in German and Russian. One guy was trying to order off the Roach Coach in Portuguese while the dude taking his order was yelling back in Pig Latin. It was a hot mess.
Within fifteen minutes of God’s proclamation, progress on the tower had stalled out worse than Ted Haggard’s dating life. Everyone was pissed and nothing was getting done. Rather than going round and round forever like some retarded Three Stooges sketch, the workers decided to bail on the building and go their separate ways.
So the people of Babel left the skyscraper looking like the Death Star in Return of the Jedi and wandered off to different parts of the world where they could buy Hello Kitty merchandise, worship cows, and wear sombreros (respectively) in peace.