• In mid-August, under the heading of “Memo to the Dept. of Magical Copyright Enforcement” (an idea which will appear again), the NY Times reported on a series of Harry Potter knock-offs released in China. They detail eight titles and their publisher summaries. Even compared to “sour and sweet rain,” excessive body hair, demons named Little Fatty Fortune, Voldemort’s brother, and an endless menagerie of dragons, the true challenge begins in Harry Potter and the Showdown: “Now what will Harry do about his two girlfriends?”
• During an October stop on her Open Book Tour, JK Rowling answered a number of questions – some of them purely logistical (how does she manage autographs and balance work with home life), a few motivational (why Dobbie [sic - boo NY Post!] dies and Dumbledore confesses his failings), and a couple on the controversy the books have created. On the religious outcry about witchcraft:
  

  “I go to church myself. I don’t take any responsibility for the lunatic fringes of my own religion…I was raised in a Christian tradition. To me, it’s [Christian overtones] always been obvious but I never wanted to talk that openly about it because I thought it might show people just what is the story, where we were going. They’re very British books, so on a very practical note, Harry was bound to find biblical quotations on tombstones. Those two particular quotations that he finds on the tombstones of Godric’s Hollow, they almost epitomize the whole series. I think they sum up all the themes in the whole series. But of course, Hogwarts is a multi-faith school.”

  This is notable in that Rowling both declares her own faith while distancing herself from the detractors among them, and emphasizing religious tolerance even within the walls of Hogwarts. The faith of students is never raised in the series, so the notion that the school is not an incidental seminary as is sometimes the heritage of British boarding schools (Latin, Greek, and Bible study) but purely focused on magickal education is laudable.

• The controversy-as-promotion also gets an airing:
  

  “I’ve always taken my annual inclusion on the most banned books list as a massive compliment. You look at the writers on that list, what can I say? There is a place for debate about issues and there’s certainly a place for debate about what we show our children and what we read to our children, but attempts to ban things are always counterproductive. I met more than one child whose parents didn’t want them to read Harry Potter and of course it became the one and only thing they wanted to read and they read it. In a way, it’s great advertising.”

  Other recent examples of this include Bill O’Reilly’s demonizing of the anti-war Redacted, which has drawn thanks from backer Mark Cuban (“anti-American”) and director Brian de Palma (“a true villain in our country”) for raising its profile and piquing interest in a wider audience; and the Catholic League’s condemnation of The Golden Compass, urging that parents not bring their children to the film, because they might then want to read the book, and then reject Catholicism once they realize the Vatican is secretly responsible for stripping the souls from children in order to protect them from discovering sex.

• In another report on the tour (many of the same quotations appear in different order), Rowling spoke more at length about the role of religion in the overall story arc, particularly the significance of the two opening epigraphs:
  

  “Deathly Hallows itself begins with two religiously themed epigraphs, one from “The Libation Bearers” by Aeschylus, which calls on the gods to “bless the children”; and one from William Penn’s “More Fruits of Solitude,” which speaks of death as but “crossing the world, as friends do the seas.” No other book in the series begins with epigraphs — a curious fact, perhaps, but one that Rowling insists served as a guiding light.

  “I really enjoyed choosing those two quotations because one is pagan, of course, and one is from a Christian tradition,” Rowling said of their inclusion. “I’d known it was going to be those two passages since ‘Chamber’ was published. I always knew [that] if I could use them at the beginning of book seven then I’d cued up the ending perfectly. If they were relevant, then I went where I needed to go.”

• And then at the Carnegie Hall appearance on the book tour, where Rowling did a reading and answered questions for the 1000 grand prize winners, she mentioned that other slightly controversial matter – “I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.” What I expected after this revelation made the headline circuit was a simple progression:
  1. Initial shock, some support from GLAAD and others.
  2. Some fans complain of being ‘betrayed’ by the revelation.
  3. Public outcry from social conservatives.
  4. A scurrilous assertion that Grindelwald is evil for embracing his sexuality, while Dumbledore can only be honorable for having remained closeted.
  5. A deliberate smear campaign suggesting Dumbledore’s relationship with Harry was unwholesome (given that, paralogically, gay = pederast).

  That I have only really run across #1 and #2 to date is either a credit to the overarching popularity of the series, with dissent largely constrained to the usual bywaters, or a willful act on the part of the mainstream press to not seek out the agitators for a condemning pullquote. What I find even more interesting than the revelation itself is the way in which Rowling couched it, and its sole implication on the plot.

  First, she says “I always thought of…” rather than the simple declarative “D = Gay” assignment. This token ambiguity allows us to consider Rowling as perhaps only a more privileged observer of the events in Harry’s world, not the final arbiter, now that the series is finished. This ‘canon view’ would posit that anything not explicitly enumerated in the text of the seven books is left open to each reader’s imagination – including Rowling’s. Contrast this with the ‘revisionist view’ a la George Lucas, where the story is never fixed by past artifact and the author can continue to revise and alter and edit indefinitely, e.g. Han no longer shoots first; or the ‘outline view’ a la Brian Herbert, where a box of unfinished story ideas is tantamount to a final work and the story arc of a series can be definitively concluded by other (arguably lesser) craftsmen. In the canon view, we can read Dumbledore as gay, straight or even asexual, since the text makes no declarations. So when Rowling goes on to elaborate:

  “… Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him.”

  …this adds a new dimension to Dumbledore’s interaction with Grindelwald, putting a new spin on his reluctance to face him in a final duel (although we must still wonder how Grindelwald could have been defeated while wielding the Elder Wand). But, strictly speaking, it is not necessary to understand the plot or even the basic dynamic between the two eventual adversaries – even as kindred minds, equally alive with the prospects of a boundless future available to their joint talents, the betrayal must have been a deep wound for Dumbledore. At the very least, Rowling recognizes the most dire implications of her introspection – “Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?”

  As for the wider response, the most positive reaction is “a gay character in the most popular series in the world is a big step for Jo Rowling and for gay rights.” The polar opposite is sadly predictable, with some complaining that their view of Dumbledore is now “stained” at the least. One woman has campaigned against the series as indoctrinating children into Wicca (having presumably never studied anything about that faith) and holding “an anti-Christian agenda” (for irony, see above). With this new revelation, she warns we must now further caution parents because, “A homosexual lifestyle is a harmful one…that’s proven, medically.” And here, perhaps, is where Rowling’s announcement has the most significance. She has declared her series, in line with critics’ assertions, to have a subversive meaning, with “the Potter books in general … a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think it’s one of the reasons that some people don’t like the books, but I think that’s it’s a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.” And there is no question that tolerance and independent, critical thought are two trends which most definitely should not be taught to children, lest we imperil our perfect social order. The aforementioned woman who has sued her school district to ban the books asks, albeit rhetorically, “Is this really what we want for our children? Is this really what we want in our schools?” And yet, is that not precisely what we do want for our children to learn in schools – how to flourish in a pluralistic society and think for themselves?

  [And just to show that the Christian Coalition of America was right to worry that Potter fans will all now want to go gay, you can order your Dumbledore Pride shirts. Will "Dumbledore's Army" be the new "Friends of Dorothy"?]

• Perhaps somewhat overshadowed by the above was Rowling dealing out a few more tidbits, such as Neville marrying Hannah Abbott, who takes over the Leaky Cauldron; Hagrid remains a bachelor; some backstory on the early days of the original Order of the Phoenix; and bits on portrait lore and life debts. More of interest to the canon is her discussion of why Molly Weasley faces off with Bellatrix, how things might have been different if she had gone with her earlier plan to kill off Arthur in book 5, and why Harry just doesn’t get the whole story at the beginning from Dumbledore’s portrait (other than the obvious “because then there’s no plot” answer).
• Adding further ammunition to the ‘Harry Potter is a menace to the conservative faction’ argument is French philosopher Jean-Claude Milner’s assertion that Harry Potter is not only politically liberal, but specifically “a diatribe against Thatcherite Britain.” Painted in neo-Marxist colours, Hogwarts becomes a den of unrest against the Muggle middle-class, blowing up Aunt Marge in HP3 is a satire on Thatcher, and (bizarrely) learning pidgin Latin is a defense against American-exported materialism. Conversely, Milner notes that Voldemort represents the opposite extreme of abandoning things for power over people (read: Sino-Soviet communism?), subverting the rise to power of an apparent ‘underclass’ into an elitist tyranny. Of course, this might be easier to accept were Hogwarts more of a Dickensian workhouse where the suffering children of dirt-poor proletariat parents learn to unionize against the moneyed classes, but the themes of class conflict and blood purity, plus the rather nice accommodations and mostly-ready acceptance of ‘middle-class’ Muggle-borns into their midst does tend to muddy the analogy.
• In the more prosaic vein, we have recently learned of a publishing spat between Warner Bros and then JK Rowling vs HP Lexicon maintainer Steve Vander Ark over the prospect of releasing the site as a compiled book. Why is Warner Bros is seeking an injuction against this unofficial tome with so many other Potter-support volumes already in circulation? From Rowling’s perspective, it is a distinction between commentary (“what happens in book 7?”) and compilation of copyrighted details. The HPL’s perspective is that the book deal was in response to requests from fans, not an attempt to cheat them or WB/Rowling out of due compensation; that all appropriate copyrights were discussed with WB and other contributors and approved; and that the lawsuit only appeared after they questioned the uncredited use of their own material in WB-produced DVDs of the Harry Potter movies, which incorporated timelines verbatim from the site, even including mistakes. This makes this a more complex (and for me, interesting) case because the law gets more vague as you involve questions of approved use and compilations rather than appropriation of copyrighted content.A database of facts cannot be copyrighted, nor can “ideas, themes and facts” on their own, yet events in fictional works can be. Precedents on restricting unofficial ‘companion’ books as violating Fair Use include The Seinfeld Aptitude Test (which was ruled infringing) and The Wind Done Gone (which was ruled a protected parody). From a strictly IANAL reading of the decisions, the critical issues for the Lexicon effort are (a) does the proposed book offer substantive commentary, criticism, etc. in addition to re-statement of characters and events from the series?; and (b) how extensive were the permissions granted by the copyright holders to the site owners? Most of the previously released Harry Potter addenda fall into pretty safe territory under (a), with most either engaging in speculation, analyzing themes, or using the texts in a ‘transformative’ manner, e.g. to act as as a lead-in to teaching other subjects such as physics or philosophy. In other cases where (a) is weak but (b) is not secured by a publisher, an ‘unofficial’ companion guide may exist solely at the forebearance of the copyright holder insofar as it’s non-competitive. That is, if the owner prefers to let the unofficial works act as unpaid advertising for the original works, there is no perceived conflict of interest.Here, Warner Bros has at least a couple potential conflicts. First, any claim by the Lexicon to infringement on the part of WB by including material from the HPL site without attribution can open them to potential damages levied against the DVD profits, which one can reasonably assume are considerable. Second, Rowling has publically stated an interest in pursuing a Harry Potter Encyclopedia project at some future stage, and the publication of the HPL could impact the buyer’s market for that type of resource (in some cases, fan-passion-driven documentation can exceed that of an official nature by orders of magnitude – need to compare the Death Star, Unicron and the HALO ringworld?).More perspectives around the Seinfeld book case are provided by trivia polymath Ken Jennings, who approaches it from the perspective of “who owns the trivia?”
• One of the only real concerns I’ve had about the Half-Blood Prince movie has been partly assuaged with the casting of Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn. Ron’s snogging partner Lavender Brown has also been named as Summerhill actress Jessie Cave, dashing the hopes of thousands of girls who turned out for open casting for the chance to mack on Rupert Grint. Now I just have to wonder how disgusting the Gaunt household will appear, and how Bonnie Wright will measure up to the expanded role and intimacy with Dan Radcliffe required of Ginny, since she’s had practically only one line per movie thus far.
• Finally, on an upbeat (and a sort of ‘up yours’ to the ‘no Harry in schools’ crowd) note: a school in Nottingshire (UK) has turned around its academic performance by presenting the material along a Hogwarts theme. As in, “children dress as their favourite Harry Potter characters, chant spells and use their wands in maths classes at Robert Mellors Primary School.” The school was also duly separated into the four Houses (no word on who gets stuck in Slytherin). Over the past three years, “standards and achievement have improved greatly” and students say “It is easier when you are thinking about Harry Potter – and having fun when you are learning.” How dramatic has the turnaround been? “The school has gone from being in the bottom 25% of all schools in England three years ago to the top 25%.” Best keep this away from our schools, or they may suffer the same fate.

That catches us up more or less to present, although no doubt we have many more laps yet to go.

Add to this the previous crackdown on the pro-democracy monks in Burma, violent reactions to student protests in Venezuela over a constitutional bid to give Hugo Chavez expanded powers and extended terms, plus slow regression towards authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin in post-Yeltsin Russia and of course certain steps taken by the Bush administration, and a more worrisome pattern emerges. In each, the dynamic is of government acting at odds with its people, and taking progressively greater autocratic steps to consolidate power within a finite ruling class. As has been deployed with great success here in linking all policy efforts to an unbounded, ill-defined ‘war on terror,’ the Pakistani emergency declaration describes the “fight against terrorism and extremism” as its justification for expanded police powers, loyalty pledges, and effective consolidation of power within the executive branch as headed by a military official. As Putin had Chechnya, and Bush the agents of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran/Syria, Musharraf has the pro-Taliban militants arrayed at his borders to serve as both rallying cry and boogeyman for explicitly anti-democratic power shifts.

The downside for those in power is that one’s allies in this pervasive engagement with the forces of terror have the potential to become international embarrassments, further entangling attempts at diplomacy. Much as it empowered brutal dictatorships during the height of the Cold War to counter the “Red Menace” of communism, the US now finds itself unable to act effectively when other sovereign nations act brutally towards subsets of their population – the Russian assaults on Chechnya, China’s human rights record in Xinjiang, Turkey’s Armenian genocide as the Ottoman Empire, and now Musharaff’s proxy war with the judiciary over pro-Taliban militants. In each case, the foreign government’s assistance in the wider war effort as engaged by the Bush administration has undermined any leverage in taking a strong stance on humanitarian grounds. The US response to the effective ’second coup’ in Pakistan is embarrassingly tepid, with both President Bush and Secretary of State Rice taking caution not to upset a military ally, just as the US did with the Ottoman Empire during World War I as the Armenian genocide progressed. China and Russia, meanwhile, have strategic ties in nations like Burma and Sudan which keeps them from acting in concert with the US, UK and France in passing resolutions by the UN Security Council to condemn those states’ human rights abuses.

The other parallel between these events, and behind even the Gunpowder Plot, is that each is ultimately about religious practice by the state. The decision to blow up Parliament and King James I was a response to religious oppression of Roman Catholics by the Protestants then in power. Meanwhile, Chechnya separatists, Xinjiang’s militant Uyghurs and Pakitan’s pro-Taliban militants are all factions pushing for an independent Islamic state in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while the Ottoman Empire was predominantly Islamic, with the unequal delineation of Muslim and Dhimmi under sharia law creating friction. Time and again, the establishment of a predominant state religion without provision for freedom of worship by other faiths proves itself a recipe for bloody, intractable conflict.

These trends – religious fundamentalism as the basis for armed insurrection, military ‘threats’ as the basis for retraction of civil liberties, and consolidation of power within a single branch of government – are not new, and each has terrible exemplars in world history. Many bear the earmarks of state or clerical fascism, and stand in stark contrast with the democratic principles that some of these movements ironically cloak themselves in. So it is with great vigilance and due concern that we must monitor attempts at reducing the role and access of people to their government, and the extent of the powers a government grants itself over its people. Thus we can draw real insight into a populist, take-back-the-reins movement from another celebration of Guy Fawkes, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta – or less dystopically (and explosively) as recently portrayed in the British series, “The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard,” where a supermarket manager fed up with a do-nothing, squabbling Parliament creates a new platform and ends up Prime Minister. To quote Thomas Jefferson,

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Or, as popularized by V for Vendetta:

“People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.”

Another more radical common-sense proposal is simply to send less money to the Federal coffers. Congress has recently show a forthright inability to balance the budget, and exhibits little restraint in overweighting essential spending bills with me-too provisions to curry favor with their constituencies. Further, efforts to manage some programs – particularly social services – at a national level has proven inefficient, inflexible, and inclined to create negative-effect systems within each. For example, education is burdened by extensive regulations such as the recent No Child Left Behind that add to the bureaucracy of each school district while removing their ability to accommodate the needs of particular groups. The curriculum has narrowed where teachers nationwide can only ‘teach to the test’ since the measure of education has been defined as a series of standardized tests. Of course social welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Veterans Affairs would need to follow some general guidelines, but could gain the flexibility offered by a Federalist arrangement.

The problem with implementing any of these reforms is entailed in the structure itself. One of the innate properties of any organism is a survival instinct, and these types of changes – making their actions more visible to the populace, lowering the general tax fund by shifting more program oversight and thus discretionary spending to the state legislatures – act against their self-interest. Moreover, the timeframe of membership in the Congress keeps the focus ever on the quick fix and the near-term gain, since you may not be around to reap the benefit of a sea change which takes a decade to accomplish its goals. Basic game theory acts to maintain the status quo, because following the path of radical change contradicts the ‘prisoner’s dilemma‘ where it is better in a group to act selfishly as a defensive measure.

What about removing the lure of profit from another system? Religious organizations are able to operate tax-exempt, and are rarely audited to preserve their non-profit status under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code. The lure of tax-free earnings has potentially inspired some cults, or influenced the development of organizations like the Church of Scientology and the Mormon Church. Religious organizations are also enjoined from engaging in political activity, which seems on its face to contradict the very purpose of the Religious Right bloc. And the amount of monies involved is not insubstantial – religious organizations hold an estimated 25 percent of all land in the US, tithes amount to tens of billions of dollars annually, and the Roman Catholic Church holds more assets than the five largest American corporations combined. The crux of the argument is whether religious organizations are equivalent to other charitable firms, and thus provide a public service to justify excluding their revenue from taxation. And without a record of reliable audits showing that individual religious groups do not indeed carry a profit, reward individual members or staff excessively, or engage in political activity, we cannot know if that equation balances. One compromise might be to remove the exemption for churches themselves, but allow them to create non-profit subsidiaries that would administer their charitable works. In politics, however, the role of religion in society is too sacrosanct to imagine such a measure ever being seriously proposed, let alone widely supported, precisely because of the expected backlash for ‘persecuting religion.’ And so the system maintains its integrity.