For the Love of God, Bless Harry Potter and My Home Sweet Home

So Daryl blogged a Harry Potter-phobic letter to the editor, the thrust of which was that because we Americans enjoy and celebrate Rowlings’ creation, God will let the terrorists win.

Considering that the whole world loves Harry Potter, it’s not clear why the fellow believes his omniscient Christian God would punish only Americans for it.

Newsweek’s “BeliefWatch” for August 6 debunks this Dobson-derivative take on Deuteronomy, saying that Harry Potter stands revealed as a Christlike figure, far from the servant of Satan that fundamentalists more literal than literate once damned him for being. Thus the letter-writer seems damned ignorant about the real power of story, both in Rowlings’ books and books of the bible.

And I don’t think it’s just Harry Potter and the Christian bible that this poor fellow doesn’t get, it’s everything! — doesn’t he sound more like these real world, ultra-orthodox middle eastern leaders self-sealed away from modern human life and culture, than like a normal mom-and-apple-pie American in 2007?

“We do not have to be drawn like apes, following the rest of the world in a sub-culture of this kind, and certainly not while violating our holy Sabbath”. . . Trade and industry minister Eli Yishai, of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, said that the [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows] launch party was “a blatant violation of employment law, which prohibits work on the Sabbath.”

. . .Most Orthodox Jews in Israel live in closed communities, often without television or radio, refraining from any contact with the secular world and its culture.

Speaking of apes, the Newsweek issue proclaiming Harry Potter to be more divine than demonic actually has a huge black African gorilla on the cover, as art for power of story about “the world’s magnificent animals” facing “new threats of extinction.” C.S. Lewis made an ape into an instrument of human estrangement from their own goodness in “The Last Battle.” I think Rowling’s genius is to see humans as carrying both hope and fear, both good and evil, to see us as magnificent, and animals, and facing new threats of extinction — to realize our ancient songs and stories need to be understood in progressively evolving ways, for anyone to win anything worth living or dying for.

“Make her victorious on land and foam . . .” went the original 1918 lyric for “God Bless America” by this Siberian immigrant who wrote it while in the U.S. Army. But he shelved it; he was sensitive enough as a lowbrow entertainer (not an educator, politician, theologian or foreign policy expert) to understand that during the trench warfare of World War I, appealing for righteous might to kill one’s ideological enemies wasn’t quite light-hearted enough for musical comedy.

He left it for a couple of decades, forgot about it until world war loomed again in 1938. Berlin then revised it to be more “peace song” than soul-sucking anthem of bloodthirsty religious triumph on the battlefield, and it fit the times well enough to be an instant pop culture ENTERTAINMENT hit and we’re not talking Christian rock.

How do you suppose real-world power of story is different between Berlin’s popular music for the stage and Rowling’s popular books for the age, to this letter-writer’s god? Deuteronomy is silent on that point, I believe.

(Deuteronomy was, by the way used as an old animal character’s name by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, in “Cats” — musical power of story in turn based on T. S. Eliot’s poetry.
Should we blame these divinely creative humans along with Rowling then, as encoded evil helping the terrorists win?)

Hardly. Our best entertainers and artists in any era help us conjure our own Patronus against the universally human fear of the dark. In the same brilliant way and with the same multicultural savvy as Irving Berlin, JK Rowling has written for our times, about terrorism and world war, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, good versus evil, the corruption of power and the will to resist it for something larger than ourselves.

Love. Overcoming. All. Not likely anyone’s god would frown on that. . .

Her transcendent theme for our age may be neither witchcraft worship nor divine self-sacrifice, so much as the the ultimate terrorists, the amoral dementors (like this fellow in Daryl’s newspaper??) ready to suck all hope and happiness from us and — if we aren’t strong enough to resist — destroy the human soul itself.

(Even culturally isolated ultra-orthodox hardliners contribute a powerful lyric now and then — right, we do NOT have to be drawn into war like apes!)

Take for example this (serious, not entertaining) Foreign Policy interview, “Seven Questions: Harry Potter and the Underestimated Prime Minister.” I am not suggesting we worship it (heaven forbid!) but in every way I can think of — and trust me, that’s a lot! –Rowling’s Harry Potter is philosophically complex, real-world power of story for our times.

What best fits the third millennium then, as moral power of story for peace and brotherhood among the most magnificent animals on Earth? Fragments of 3,000- year old political and moral teachings rendered for the tribal mystic meme, or power of story enriched by that AND all the millennia and memes since then, to become art and literature transcending the meaning of war itself?

Berlin lived a full century, almost long enough to experience nine-eleven and the global appeal of Harry Potter’s power of story. If he had lived another few years, would he have revised his American peace song again, to fit this third world war?

Or maybe we can do it for ourselves. Maybe all “God Bless America” needs is for us to hear it with third-millennium ears ,with post-Harry Potter understanding, to emphasize the word LOVE that’s right there in the middle of it already, to hum not the title about God and country fighting to win, but the last phrase of this enduringly popular piece of entertainment, to keep the dementors of any era at bay and ourselves out of their prisons — “my home sweet home.”