Quote:
Originally Posted by Muncle
I was surprised that no one caught my "dementor" comment to Tony in the Community Watch thread yesterday. Needless to say, I was kidding, or at least exaggerating a tad when I referred to the Administrators as TOTV's Dementors.
Kate, I loved the Harry Potter books -- had to read them to find out what was enthralling my great-nieces et al. And I loved it that they were infuriating some of the ultra-fundamentalists. ............
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I have it on good authority that librarians got hate mail (well, I guess it was semi-polite hate mail) when Harry Potter was first published. I knew of one mailing that contained a clipping from an "authoritative" publication. At the center of so many completely wrong statements was a glaringly wrong statement that said that Harry Potter "worshiped the Dementors." Yep. That's what it said. Right there in that "authoritative" publication delivered to the librarian.
But the librarian restrained herself admirably and did not say back to that self-righteous letter-writer, "WHY IN THE
DON'T YOU AT LEAST READ THE BOOK YOU
BEFORE YOU START SENDING THIS
TO A LIBRARIAN???"
There is a common denominator with those people. The biggest percentage have not read the book.
I have a long-time friend who thinks quite differently from me on a lot of things. That's OK. There are just certain things that we have a tacit understanding not to discuss. But I could not stand the Harry Potter thing anymore and so I asked her what the issue was. Why should wizardry be such an issue, I wanted to know. Kids know better. They just liked the books. Adults, too. The chance to totally suspend reality for a while. A good and evil struggle. All that stuff.
Her answer to me was a surprise. She told me that because kids were so mesmerized by the books and often read them more than once and were so completely immersed in them, taken in, so to speak, that could cause their minds to possibly be opened to being taken in by other things, all kinds of bad things. Cults. Satan worshipers. (and I had to wonder if maybe even
Democrats 
)
...... I thought that cause and effect processing was a real leap. Gee. And to think that I had just thought that J.K. was a phenomenal writer. Who knew???!
Anyway, I said I did not agree and then changed the subject. We are still friends. But like I said, some things -- no point in even trying to discuss. They are so convinced that they are absolutely right on this stuff. Oh well.
And Munc and Kate, I am not worried about those little crushes of yours. Harry Potter takes us all back to being kids for a while. And the ones you mention are the ones that your kid-self would have liked and hoped to sit next to in class and whose pencil you would have tried to work up the courage to borrow, hoping for a little conversation. Harry Potter makes us all kids again.
Boomer