This Blog is Not About Harry Potter.

For a world-wide, history-making, literary and cultural phenomenon, it's incredible that it's still so shameful to be caught reading Harry Potter.

It's a tricky enigma. Do you go to the bookstore at midnight to stand in the giant line of Harry Potter fanatics (towering above most of them, whose median age is roughly the number of years I've been legally drinking,) banking on the probability of running into a colleague being greatly reduced due to the late hour? Or do you visit the bookstore during reasonable business hours like a normal person, carrying around a Noam Chomsky book until the very last second at the register when you look over your shoulder, swallow your pride and swap it out for the kiddie book, mumbling something about a nephew who's a big reader?

As a species, humans are, for the most part, infinitely forgiving. We are blessed with the ability to look the other way when Aunt Carrie has a little too much to drink at the reunion and takes her top off during the egg toss. We will grit our teeth and hold our tongues when our boyfriends show up wearing white socks with their black suits. Many of us RE-ELECTED GEORGE W. BUSH. Infinitely forgiving.

But God forbid you run into an acquaintance while standing in line to buy tickets for License to Wed when clearly you should be seeing Transformers. Or how about the moment someone comes to your door while you're jamming to Britney Spears? You might wrinkle your nose at somebody who eats at McDonalds, but you would never stop being their friend. Yet friendships have clearly been won and lost - unapologetically! - based on the contents of your iPod. We judge the worth of a person based on the pop culture they consume.

And so we have the Alan Greenspans of the world, and then we have the Paris Hiltons. We have the Ann Coulters and the Keith Olbermanns. We have the Fugazis and the Spice Girls. It's ideological war, and there is no right or wrong. Some people are always going to think others are vapid idiots or pretentious assholes, and they're all going to be right. Like it or not, there's no accounting for taste.

So how do we heal the world? How do we bring together the right and the left, the high art and low art, the dreamers and the realists?

Come on, guys, that's easy.

We kill Voldemort.

Femme Fatality
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