Posted 7:21 PM by Floyd

Today's the Mercury News contains an article by John Orr that almost, but does not quite, review the new Harry Potter book. Orr starts off by making sure that everyone knows how much he dislikes racism:

Parents can take comfort in knowing that if their children embrace the values of this delightful series, they will be less likely to grow up to be racists, ageists or sexists, or to blindly trust government or other bureaucracies.

Whenever someone says "racists, ageists or sexists", or some similar construct, they are not really concerned about age or sex-based discrimination. They want to say "racism" a lot, maybe twenty times, but then their editor cuts them down to three repetitions and makes them change two of the words.

Orr then writes a few hundred words giving an overview of the book, sans spoilers. Then he realizes how lucky he is. If not for the grace of God he could have been born as Severus Snape or, even worse, a Republican. He expresses his gratitude by writing these lines congratulating himself, and all those like him, on his enlightened politics:

These books are really about us, about real life, told in the clever parables of Rowling's magical world. In a time when our own, non-magical world is tottering on the edge of conflagration; when our own government, in a panic, creates the Patriot Act, which threatens constitutional rights and civil liberties that had existed for 230 years, this book couldn't be more apt.

I was going to give Orr credit for not saying "Ashcroft." But then I realized that the liberal intelligentsia have whipped themselves into such hysteria over Mr. Beat-by-a-Corpse, for Orr to say his name would be akin to the effect of a Harry Potter character saying "Voldemort."