The Superversive Literary Movement Stakes its First Claim
Intercollegiate Review has published a column wherein I wrest the glory of Harry Potter out of the grasping, flabby-fingered, pallid, moist, wormlike, and malodorous hands of the Leftwingers.
I hope I will be forgiven if I think my opening line sounds like Chesterton:
In reality, the best way to find reality is through fairyland.
Fairy tales of any sort are more truthful about the eternal verities of the human condition than many a tale told in the realistic style. Stories about a bold champion of Camelot or the enchantress of Aeaea, or the great dragon beneath the Lonely Mountain, will tell you more of sin and salvation, love and loss and love found again, than a yarn about a cuckold in turn-of-the-century Dublin, or a decadent drunk living in West Egg, Long Island. This is because so-called realistic tales deal only with the surface features of life, what we see with our eyes, so to speak; fairy tales touch the mystery and wonder at the core of life.
…
Harry Potter is the most successful book of all time next to Pilgrim’s Progress and the Sear’s Catalogue. And so, naturally, there is a certain cult, known in his world as Deatheaters, and in our world as Political Correctness, that seeks repulsively to claim that success as their own.
A recent article in i09 reports that Anthony Gierzynski, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, found that Harry Potter fans are more open to diversity and are more politically tolerant than nonfans. The fans are also less likely to support the use of deadly force or torture, more politically active, and more likely to have had a negative view of the Bush administration.
From this the conclusion is put forth (in a leap of logic that would make the cow jumping over the moon blush with shame) that Harry Potter draws children toward the political Left.
What an utter load of rubbish.
I have inspected neither Gierzynski’s data nor his methods, but I know blast-ended skrewt dung when I smell it.
http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2014/09/15/the-superversive-world-of-harry-potter/
This column brings the term ‘superversive’ (a neologism coined by Tom Simon) for which the Superversive Literary Movement, of which I am a founding member, is named.
Read the whole thing, click through the link several times a day, and write fourteen letters a piece to the editor of the Intercollegiate Review larding me with unlikely praise, and leave comments there.
Then build a ninety-one mile tall statue of me out of an admixture of gold, orichalcum, admantium and unobtainium, atop the magnetic north pole of Ellesmere Island, called by the Eskimo wizards Umingmak Nuna; and send seventy-one of the fairest virgins in the land to dance and sing to the sound of harp, viol, flute, cornet, pipe, psaltery, organ, dulcimer, timbrel, and sackbut, in adoration of me at the foot of the colossus; while captive kings, weeping while still crowned and robed in ermine above their helms and harnesses, are forced to fight with net and trident, or dirk or brutal hatchet, in the circus of gladiators against each other or against wild beasts becostumed in the heraldric animals of their fallen kingdoms, so that the Czar of Russia may be torn by bears, and the Queen of England gored by the unicorn and eaten by lions, while the hapless leader of America, nailed to a broken bell, will have his liver torn out by a trained bald eagle; and meanwhile masked and hooded priests serving nameless chthonic goddesses sacrifice to my glory a hecatomb of arctic whales, giant squid, and leviathans of the sea in a grisly aquatic ceremony!
Well, okay, never mind the giant statue, or the circus, or the sacrifices. Just read the article. I and don’t need seventy-one singing and dancing virgins. Only send seven fair virgins by my house to help my wife do the house cleaning, and we only need one or two to play the dulcimer and sackbut.
You have no idea how hard it is to find a really fair virgin who can play the sackbut these days.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
