In Defense of 'Arry Pottah

[The title is a poor rendering of an Eastender Accent of the name "Harry Potter."]

Christian groups across the west are gearing up in the long battle against Harry Potter once again. In England, primary schools that have set up days to celebrate the beloved fictional character:

Pupils from The Holt Primary School in Skellingthorpe, Lincs, were planning to dress up as witches and wizards.

But the event - to mark the launch of the new JK Rowling book - was scrapped after parents and a local rector expressed concerns about witchcraft.

Headteacher Paul Martin said the rector claimed he was seeking "to lead our children into areas of evil".

Children are said to have been left upset and confused by the cancellation of the day, which was due to be held before the launch of Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince on Saturday.

...
In a letter to parents, headteacher Paul Martin wrote: "When I received a letter from the rector which suggested that I was 'seeking to lead our children into areas of evil', I felt that the situation was escalating disproportionately.

"May I reassure parents that my staff and I only wished to raise the profile of reading.

"We did not wish to cause any offence or upset and the fact that it has turned sour is entirely regrettable.

"I now wish to put this behind us and pull together to make the end of term a happy and positive experience."

Now, this "lead to evil" concept is a strange one, but it is a primary concern among the Christrian cultural conservatives in America as well. Harry Potter books, across the US, have been the most banned books from schools for this exact reason, and this reason only.

It would seem, from Rowling's astronomical success with the Potter franchise that the majority of English-speaking readers simply do not agree.

And neither, folks, to the AntiCentenarian. Our primary complaint with having a Harry Potter day in school would be because of the corporatist-marketing aspects of such an adventure- but with McDonald's and Dominoe's Pizza feeding our children at lunch, it seems an infinitely more admirable choice to promote, yes, literacy in our schools among the multidinous other cultural options.

But there is a larger misinterpretation of Harry Potter that the Cultural prescriptivist Conservatives wish to exploit: the idea of "evil" in Potter. This is where Mr. General fundamentally takes this argument to task. Because, you see, Harry Potter isn't about "witchcraft" or anything that fits into those lines- the magic within the stories is a metaphoric expression for a person's inner life. It is the quest to discover how to turn your inner strengths out into the world.

It is an examination of the learning process of Ethics over one of the more tumultuous period in a person's life, adolescence. It's about Harry and his crew experieincing good and bad in the world, and trying to figure out how they fit in to that; what their best place will be; how to best actualize both the good and the bad intentions within him into the best thing for the world.

So, by combating this whole method of literature, the Right combats A) the serious fiction that's been targeted to contemporary youth to read; B) the first popular fiction that's emboldened the education system to actually promote reading with any popularity; C) the exposure through literature of this kind of ability to work through, in ways that deeply relate to the target audiences, these serious and interesting ethical and moral questions.

That's the shame in the event. Because, after all, 'Arry Pottah is Eeeeeevil.