You know things are serious when the apathetic stop shrugging and start paying
attention. By the time they do, the lines have long since been drawn deep in the sand, dividing
good (us) from evil (them). Of course right will prevail in the end,
because it simply must.
If
only the dividing line between good and evil were as clear in this
world as it in the wizarding world. Sure, there is ambiguity aplenty
in J.K. Rowling's latest, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Some
characters we thought we knew surprise us with their traitorous acts.
Others turn out to be more worthy of pity than loathing. And even as
our hearts break, there is a slim ray of something that just might
be hope, probably misguided, but unquenchable, nonetheless, that
maybe, just maybe, death doesn't have to mean goodbye.
But
meanwhile, here in the land of Muggles, the news is unrelentingly bad,
and our heroes keep disappearing on us. Perhaps that's why 6.8 million
people bought the latest Harry Potter opus this past weekend, hoping
to lose themselves, if only for a short while, in Quidditch and Apparation,
in the psychoanalyzing of Lord Voldemort (who, it turns out, had a
really crummy childhood), in rooting for teenage romance and its obligatory
snogging. Retreating to fantasy seems as healthy a reaction as any
when each morning's paper is filled with suicide bombers, cops shooting
toddlers and grim new body count records being set in our perpetual
war on terror.
And
yet Rowling doesn't let us off the hook that easily. In the very second
sentence of this 652-page opus, someone recognizable makes an appearance
when the British Prime Minister ruminates at his desk while he waits
"for a call from the President of a far distant country, and between
wondering when the wretched man would telephone, and trying to suppress
unpleasant memories of what had been a very long, tiring, and difficult
week, there was not much space in his head for anything else." Hmm. Sounds familiar.
"Harry
has taken the view, I think, that they are now at war," Rowling told Katie Couric
on Sunday night's Dateline. About time, too, given what the kid's been
through (murdered parents, murdered godfather, murdered friend, sworn
enemy of the most powerful wizard ever, etc. etc. etc.). Yes, it's
war for our boy, who's rapidly becoming a man, and as anyone who's
been paying attention knows, war is not for the fainthearted. It's
a messy business, filled with body bags and doublespeak, with talk
of acceptable casualties, collateral damage and the dismissing of insurgents
as fanatics who deserve exactly what they get. Oops, sorry, got the
two worlds confused there for a minute.
But
there are parallels here. The new Minister of Magic tries to enlist
Harry as a sort of "poster boy" for their side, and we give a silent
cheer when our hero sees through the man's unctuousness and stands
up to him, calling him on the unjust imprisonment of an innocent: "You're
making Stan a scapegoat," Harry says. "Just like you want to make me
a mascot." Good one, Harry! But our boy's not done yet. "You never
get it right, you people, do you? Either we've got Fudge, pretending
everything's lovely while people get murdered right under his nose,
or we've got you, chucking the wrong people into jail."
Yes,
we've got our own version of Azkaban, a little place called Abu Graib,
and we've got our own sycophantic bureaucrats putting spin on their
latest talking points, and we've got our own Dark Lord du jour, whether
he's called Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, and there will always
be an unbeatable foe, and by God, if Oceania is at war now with Eurasia,
then we have always been at war with Eurasia. And if all else fails,
blame it on Bill Clinton.
So
yes, we run out and buy our copy of Harry Potter, and we lament that
it may be another two years before Rowling finishes the next (and the
last! sob!) book, and we pat our copy of Half-Blood Prince a bit regretfully
when we've read the last page. Because for a time, a day or a week
or a month, we were somewhere else. And yes, there is a war raging
there as well, but they've got a bona fide hero, one who has enough
sense to shrug off claims that he's "The Chosen One," a hero who finally,
and satisfyingly gets the girl he deserves, a hero who makes mistakes
and learns from them, a hero who realizes that sometimes he's wrong,
a hero who has the guts to change his mind and to rethink his position,
a hero capable of feeling pity for even his sworn enemies.
Sounds a bit like magic, doesn't it?