Like so many other Canadians, and citizens in countries around the world, I offer my profound thanks to the American electorate for making the right decision. After the past eight years, a lot of us doubted you could arise from what seemed a collective stupor in time to act to preserve the ideals of the nation that, when handled properly, is truly the world’s most inspiring state.

That said — there are still more than 55 million rednecks, retards, racists and recidivists that deserve nothing but scorn and derision. They were the folks represented by those dudes who felt the time was right to boo every mention of their next president during John McCain’s concession speech last night.

To those 55 million people, and especially to the idiots who proudly declared their unabashed ignorance and pettiness during an historic live television broadcast, I as: Why do you hate America? Why are you not supporting your new President? Your nation is at WAR, remember? I thought criticism of the president during wartime was treasonous. Fox News taught me that!

I can’t ever remember being as proud of something I had nothing to do with than I am today. I’m still not sure how I feel about it all (okay, that’s a lie, I’m happy as fuck and I can’t stop grinning, but a picture of me looking like a blissful fool wouldn’t make a good blog post). What I mean is that I am at a loss for words. I can only hope that one day I get to feel the same way casting a ballot for somebody as huge majority of you guys did last night.

If that happens, that will mean my country got something right. Just as yours has done.

But this post is not about waxing poetic on the meaning of this historic event. That will come tomorrow, when hopefully I have a littl perspective.

No — this post is about being juvenile. It is about being an ungracious winner. It is about schadenfreude, revelling in the pain ofa long despised enemy and dancing on the carcass of the freshly-slain dragon.

Oh! I’m gonna have so much fun! I’m heading back to freeperville (aka FreeRepublic.com) to take in the sights and sounds of what a Bush-lovin’, Mavericky, Right-Wingin’ bunch of startlingly undereducated adults get a taste of their own medecine.

What follows has not been edited, except where poor spelling and grammar made it nearly unintelligible. Other than that, these are Republicans — self-proclaimed patriotic, country-first, God-fearing, Christian Republicans — reacting to the news that CNN has declared Barack Obama (“that one!”) the President Elect of the United States of America.

I will also attempt (remembering that I did pay to go to journalism school and that one should not wholly abandon fairness even in the spirit of juvenile victory celebrations) to display examples of Freepers who appear concillatory and willing to stand behind their new president. I do not expect much, but we shall see.

My comments are in parantheses. As you can see, most of these America-lovin’ folks are as classy in defeat as they were in victory. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

• I think reality TV started the decline of our culture. Seriously, when people like William Hung can be mega celebrities, something is wrong!

• My tears are for the nation and for the babies who will die as a result of this election. (No. Your tears are for me, and everyone like me who had to suffer through the time when people as backwards as you thought the world’s most important country was moving in the “right” direction. And your tears are as sweet as well-aged mead.)
• And to think Michelle Obama will be the first lady. Why do I have a feeling many people are going to wake up tomorrow and think “my God, what have we done?” The scandals Obama brings with him are going to make the Clintons look like saints. I believe Obama will eventually be ousted in disgrace. Are America’s enemies dancing in the streets yet? (If by “enemies” you mean, people who hated the fact that your ilk ever had a controlling voice in American foreign policy … then yes. Yes. We. Are.)
• I’m also seriously entertaining the idea that Obama may indeed be THE Anti-Christ. Nothing else explains the mass hypnosis effect among the sheeple. If so, be ready, for the Lord draweth nigh. (Wow.)
• Kiss, hug and tell all your family they love you. FReepers will be the first to go. Can’t allow any opposition to the New World Order. (It is this type of comment that makes me wish that this type of comment was true, if that makes any sense.)

• I have the post hammered feeling and I don’t even drink. But right now, I wish my stomach could take it. I lost my best girl friend over this election and have no shoulder to cry on because she’s probably jumping for joy over our new Marxist overlord. (I am so goddamn happy for this dude’s ex-girlfriend right now.)

That felt really good. Now hopefully all Americans can put partisanship aside and get behind President-Elect Obama. Right?

We’re going for a lighter mood these days, like I mentioned last time. So in honour of this sordid affair, we present the top ten country songs Mindy McCready could record about her relationship with “Rocket” Roger Clemens:

10. “I Was Hit By Your Pitch But I Won’t Take My Base”

9. “You Put It Straight Down The Middle and I was Taking All the Way”

8. “If You Misremember Your Age, I’ll Misremember My Wife … Just For Tonight”

7. “Inject Me With Your Love Until My Testicles Recede”

6. “You’ve Already Got Two Balls, Now It’s Time to Swing Away”

5. “I’ll Put The ‘Young’ In All the Cys You’ve Won”

4. “I Was Trying For The Strikeout But You Intentionally Walked Right Into My Heart”

3. “Yours Is the Only Mound I’ll Take On Less Than Five Days Rest”

2. “You’re The Only Minor In My League”

1. “I’m Down 0-2, and That Third Strike Is You

(With help from ManZoneTM. What can I say? We’re in a much lighter mood at work today. Ignoring American politics and a Red Wings victory will do that to you…)

Are there two things on this Earth that go together more perfectly than sports commentary and Japanese poetry? Besides, with all the words that we wasted yesterday discussing these trades ad nauseum, I figured I would cut back and improve my literary footprint.

So, here is my commentary on the major trades of yesterday’s NHL frenzy, in short, traditional haikus:

The Pittsburgh Penguins acquired right winger Marian Hossa and winger Pascal Dupuis from the Atlanta Thrashers for center Angelo Esposito, right winger Colby Armstrong, center/winger Erik Christensen and a first-round draft pick in 2008.

He cost them a lot

Will he score in the playoffs?

Sens fans all say, ‘No.’

The Pittsburgh Penguins acquired defenseman Hal Gill from the Toronto Maple Leafs for a second-round draft pick in 2008 and a fifth-round draft pick in 2009.

A really tall man

Who cannot skate very fast

Just hit the jackpot

The Dallas Stars acquired center/left winger Brad Richards and goaltender Johan Holmqvist from the Tampa Bay Lightning for goaltender Mike Smith, left winger/center Jussi Jokinen and center/right winger Jeff Halpern and a fourth-round draft pick in 2009.

Got off sinking ship

Too bad Holmqvist followed you

He is terrible

The San Jose Sharks acquired defenseman Brian Campbell and a seventh-round draft pick in 2008 from the Buffalo Sabres for right winger Steve Bernier and a first-round draft pick in 2008.

Big payday ahead

But first you’re off to Cali

Sure beats Buffalo

The Florida Panthers acquired right winger/defenseman Wade Belak from the Toronto Maple Leafs for a fifth-round draft pick in 2008.

A fifth-round pick is

Better than a bag of pucks

You go, Trader Cliff!

The Washington Capitals acquired goaltender Cristobal Huet from the Montreal Canadiens for a second-round draft pick in 2009.

The rookie is good

You were no longer needed

So they dumped your ass

The Colorado Avalanche acquired defenseman Ruslan Salei from the Florida Panthers for defenseman Karlis Skrastins and a third-round draft pick in 2008.

Two old men are dealt

Both of them are foreigners

And nobody cares

The Carolina Hurricanes acquired winger Tuomo Ruutu from the Chicago Blackhawks for winger Andrew Ladd.

Untapped potential,

the sound of one hand clapping,

they are both worthless

The Ottawa Senators acquired right winger Martin Lapointe from the Chicago Blackhawks

He won a cup once

With some guy named ‘Yzerman’

They don’t have that guy

The Florida Panthers acquired left winger/center Chad Kilger from the Toronto Maple Leafs for a third-round draft pick in 2008.

Pack your bags again

The moving van is waiting

No, you cannot stay

The Colorado Avalanche acquired defenseman Adam Foote from the Columbus Blue Jackets for a conditional first-round draft pick in 2008 or 2009 and a conditional fourth-round selection in 2009.

A long journey home

Back to where they know your name

Too bad you’re old now

The Washington Capitals acquired center Sergei Fedorov from the Columbus Blue Jackets for defenseman Ted Ruth.

In spring he was good

Summer made him petulant

Now it’s his autumn

The Washington Capitals acquired winger Matt Cooke from the Vancouver Canucks for winger Matt Pettinger.

Trade two guys named ‘Matt’

The Canucks fans will notice

Caps fans? Not so much

The Washington Capitals acquired left winger/center Alexandre Giroux from the Atlanta Thrashers for winger Joe Motzko.

Winter’s frost lingers

as the deadline deals are made

So does apathy

The Detroit Red Wings acquired defenseman Brad Stuart from the Los Angeles Kings for a second-round draft pick in 2008 and a fourth-round draft pick in 2009.

He is a big guy

All he cost them was draft picks

At least he’s healthy

The Anaheim Ducks acquired defenseman Marc-Andre Bergeron from the New York Islanders for a third-round draft pick in 2008.

He has two first names

So do both of their goalies

What is Burke up to?

The Minnesota Wild acquired left winger Chris Simon from the New York Islanders for a sixth-round draft pick in 2008.

He’s a psychopath

And they’ve got a steroid freak

What is up with that?

If you thought political advertising was all the same; just a bunch of catchphrases spouted by white people over a swirling musical score and images of Good People doing Good Thing and having Good Times and Prosperity …

… well …

You don’t know Hillary Clinton.

These two videos are both Internet advertisments for her campaign. The first was put together by her supporters — it’s NOT an official Clinton campiagn advertisment, it’s done by a CEO supporter — and will make you want to retch, claw out your brain and never listen to the Jackson Five again. (Clinton’s fan who made this, however, probably owes some royalties). The second one — which was made by her campaign staffers and is part of her official Youtube collection — will make you wonder what the fuck is wrong with he campaign strategists and (if you are a university student) will insult your intelligence in a manner rivalled only by listening to George W. Bush debate the finer points of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’.

Enjoy!

Failure No. 1:

Failure No. 2:

You’re welcome.

Far be it from me to take issue with the inanity of an article that appears in the Sunday Star … but one begins to wonder after a while if that paper (interesting as it sometimes is) is becoming the newspaper equivalent of academics who talk to hear the sound of their own voices spouting obvious truths.

(This right here, by the way, is the blog equivalent of the same thing, only with curse words and added vitriol. And I don’t charge you $1. Yet.)

In today’s breaking news, there are similarities between the stories of Harry Potter and Jesus Christ.

Surely, this is a heretofore undiscovered aspect of JK Rowling’s stories. In fact, she just might be the first writer ever to, unconsciously or no, echo the Biblical story in a work of fiction. Harry Potter may also be the first literary hero for whom Christ-like comparisons can be drawn.

But, just in case some wily fiction writer has attempted to slip one past us over the countless years that humans have been telling stories, let us use the writer’s (in the interest of fairness, I note here that this article is actually reprinted from the The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.) piece to set up a checklist of sorts:

1. A profound, if subtle, moral interplay is found between Harry and Dumbledore, who effectively lead the joint forces of good.
2. Dumbledore knows Harry plays a unique and indispensable role in the battle against evil and outwardly helps him from time to time. Yet, for most of the series, Dumbledore keeps Harry unaware of the depth of their relationship, of the goings-on known or orchestrated by Dumbledore involving the bigger picture. In the course of his young life, Harry often feels Dumbledore is ignoring his personal needs. A well-known, heart-wrenching passage in the Bible, from an anguished Jesus on the cross, captures their relationship well: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”
3. Harry has followers who are devoted to him even if they don’t always understand him, and other fair-weather fans who probably don’t know what to make of him half the time. And, of course, enemies. Sound familiar?
4. Dumbledore, for his part, is a benevolent, godlike presence at the school. He doesn’t seem to want to show all his powers, perhaps to avoid exerting pressure that would impede others’ freedom of choice.
5. Well, in the Gospels, Judas is allowed access to Jesus, and is allowed to alert the authorities to his whereabouts. God the Father didn’t prevent this. In fact, Christianity teaches that the crucifixion following Jesus’s capture was necessary to redeem the world. Dumbledore repeatedly says he trusts Snape, but what does he mean by this?
6. In death, then, he would save the world.

So … as we can clearly see from this list, Rowling is utterly unique in the way she takes one of the oldest stories known to humankind and draws parallels to it through her modern work of fantasy and/or science fiction. Obviously, the Star (or at least the writer that they are publishing this Sunday) has worked long and hard to find the qualities in a fantasy hero and his mentor that closely echo (or at least faintly echo) the relationship between the Christian God and Jesus Christ.

I was personally very shocked to see this laid out in newsprint for me. It’s almost like Rowling was just following some sort of archetype, perhaps without even knowing it herself.

It is funny though how she, and she alone, managed to finally echo the works of the Bible and turn it into popular fiction. You would think, the Bible being as old as the Earth, and thus more than 2,000 years young, that somehow a writer out to make a buck would have taken the story of the Bible and slapped some cool clothes on a character in a blatant effort to create a new-age Jesus…

I will try to keep this short, but there are many reasons that I like my country. I won’t go off and reflect all emotionally on it, because it’s not like that, really. Canadians tend to leave that to other countries who take a more, shall we say, vocal stance on why their country is great and yours is not as great as theirs. And that’s fine. They’re Americans. Obnoxious patriotism is one of their finest exports and why so many of their citizens find expectorate in their soup when they visit Paris.

While there is certainly something to be said for loving your country and being vocal about it, Canadians tend not to do that so much. There are notable exceptions of course, hockey being the main one:

(One of my happiest evenings as a poorly-paid reporter involved showing up at CP for work about an hour after the gold-medal game in 2002, being handed a mini-disc player and told to go out and “record the sounds of the celebration”. Only in Canada, after a gold medal triumph in Olympic hockey, will you ever see dozens of girls topless on the street in February.)

But those open displays are exceptions, not the rule. In general, and it shouldn’t come off as snobbish but I understand how it does, we’re just sort of quietly proud that our country is done — for the most part — right. This is, after all, the nation where instead of just pardoning all his shifty buddies as a final ‘fuck-you’, our ex-Prime Minister decided to just go out and create a whole bunch of new national parks.

And the casual multiculturalism is nice, too. I played basketball last weekend (on seperate days) with three black guys, two Indian kids and a couple of other white dudes. We had to watch out for the kids playing street cricket just behind us, though. Nobody batted an eye. Except when one of the little black kids almost got his head taken off by the cricket ball. Those things are fucking hard. And they hurt. But there was no harm done. I don’t bring this up as a look-at-this, so much as a this-is-how-it-is. It’s been like that since I was small.

And so is the casual tolerance and lack of xenophobic paranoia: Crossing the border on the way to New York City by car with an unshaven, hungover Indian friend a month ago was a hassle and a half. The American customs agent was just looking for an excuse to turn us back. It was kind of ugly, until he figured out I was a journalist and my friend was a teacher. On the way back to Canada, with a now even-scruffier, more hungover and generally disheveled pal (with the same skin tone) we got the thirty-second, ‘How long was your stay? How much did you buy? Okay. Welcome home, guys.’

Mind you, this country was never perfect, and it’s not quite as good as it used to be, what with Stephen Harper doing his best George Bush impersonation and some fuckos out West selling us all out in the name of oil money, but hopefully we’ll be able to rectify at least the first of those two scenarios very soon. There are already loads of Toronto Star editorials that will illustrate how, why, when and where we are dropping one (or more) balls, so I won’t get into our faults, though we do have many. (Not that you’d know it from watching Michael Moore movies. Who knew I never paid a dime for health care and got every procedure I ever needed, on time, for free?)

But …. the reason I wrote this today is that the Live Earth concert really pissed me off. I hate posturing for political purposes. I hate it more when the political posturing masquerades as environmental crusading. And I really fucking hate it when the cause you’re campaigning for is actually being actively damaged by the awareness event you are holding.

These two in particular made me want to ball something up and throw it in the general direction of the recycling:

Concert-goers at the event’s London leg had left thousands of plastic cups on the floor of Wembley Stadium, although organizers had urged audience members to use the recycling bins provided, the BBC reported.

and:

Al Gore was unhappy with the travel arrangements of the UK band Razorlight. After their appearance at the London Live Earth event, they were ferried to an airport in a large tour bus with a police escort to catch a private jet to Scotland. From the airport in Scotland they travelled by helicopter to Balado to perform at another event. Razorlight claimed they would offset their emissions by planting trees.

Go plant some fucking trees then, assholes.

Anyway, I was feeling very angry and depressed about this self-aggrandizing waste of everyone’s time and energy and newsprint and airspace, until I realized that Canada didn’t play a part in it. Aside from a couple of small street parties featuring local musicians (that weren’t officially part of Live Earth), we stayed away from this one.

This was the biggest party in Canada that day:

In nearby Dundas Square, Live Earth concerts from around the world were broadcast on a giant television screen, and street performers entertained the crowd in the hot sun. The entire event was powered by green electricity generated from wind and low-impact water sources.

And that makes me feel a little bit happier about the whole thing.

Today, I found this, and felt even better:

This, my friends, is a low-emission sports car. A sports car that “uses just 2.6 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres without compromising performance”:

The unique feature of this car however is a turbocharged 1.5-litre Honda engine adapted to run on fuel vapour ­ a much leaner mixture of fuel and air than is used in proprietary engines. In test runs the Alé achieved 92 miles per US gallon with extremely low CO2 emissions to match.

See — now this is a car that rock bands won’t be ashamed to show up to ridiculously pompous, look-aren’t-we-saving-the-world-now-one-song-at-a-time events in, and it will actually do the environment some good.

My biggest beef with SmartCars and all the rest is they are not something that you could convince, say, your average multi-platinum rapper to purchase and slap some rims on. This one, however, I think you could.

It’s environmentally sound, it’s fast as fuck, and it even looks like a giant penis. What the hell else could you ask for?

Anyway, the point of this whole thing is that I like my country because we make shit like this, which might actually help, instead of hosting overblown events to call attention to the fact that: ‘Hey! We care about the environment over here! See? Look how much we care! We got Madonna and everything! Shhhhh … Don’t worry about the plastic cups, we’ll hire black people to clean those up later and then we’ll all go plant some trees to make up for the energy we just wasted flying the rock stars around …‘

Anyway, my point? We will kick your fucking ass at hockey. Any time. Any place. Don’t you ever doubt that.

Also, we’re not as pompous as you, rest of the world. And I kind of like it that way.

Since the latest movie opens this week and the final Harry Potter book is only a few weeks away, it seems like a suitable time to smack the little boy wizard back to his rightful place. Just so he doesn’t get out of line.

In a poll taken in Britain, Harry Potter is only the third-best wizard ever (though how a 17-year-old is better than fucking Merlin, I can’t understand). Still, throughout my enjoyment of the entire Potter series, the one thing that runs through my mind is that Dumbledore — nice, kind and goodly wizard that he is — couldn’t carry Gandalf’s jock. And the English people have come through for me.

For more on this great battle, you can read commentary from an awesome site that used to narrate epic battles like this all the time.

In other Potter-related news (I know that’s why half of you come here):

• Some people have taken geekdom to a whole new level by creating ‘wizard rock’ in which “each (band) chooses a character from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories and writes songs from that character’s perspective.” The show organizer claims that “There’s never been anything like this before,”but clearly she missed out on both the Lords of the Rhymes as well as the classic Star Wars Rap. Draco and the Malfoys score points with me, however, for what is now my favourite wizard-rock song title: “My Dad is Rich, Your Dad is Dead.”
• Also, Daniel Radcliffe is staying away from female actresses, because they are “insane”. In other words, Emma Watson told him to fuck right off. Also, Radcliffe warns that you cannot call him Harry Potter during sex, or he will kick you out of bed. Can I still call him ‘horsey-boy’, then? Is that still cool, Dan?
• For the hardcore geeks out there, lots of people have been wondering if Snape was hiding under an invisibility cloak while Voldemort killed Harry’s parents. Rowling says that, “No, he wasn’t.”

I try to avoid writing about science. For two reasons. One, because I don’t have time to call people and interview them for this blog. And two, because I went to Ryerson, so if I’m going to write about science, I generally like to have someone on hand to, y’know, ’splain it to me.

But this isn’t science, really, it’s psychology. (Sorry, three-quarters of my extended family). And there’s nothing quite like psychology for taking several paragraphs to explain why something that we already know to be true is, in fact, true.

Psychology Today has published a list of Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. It’s quite an interesting article, provided you understand that most of the research behind it is psychology-based and thus still open to speculation.

A few of the truths are of the ‘Duhhh’ variety:

• Muslims are more likely to be suicide bombers because they believe that 72 black-eyed virgins await them in heaven.
• Men prefer big-breasted blondes because hair colour and breast size (as well as waist-to-hip ratio) have all been historically symbolical of youth and fertility).
• Monogamy benefits men more than women (because we live much shorter lives when we don’t have anyone to ‘get inna kitchen a bake me a pie!’).

Others are a little more interesting:

• Politicians and other powerful men risk it all for affairs because, consciously or not, the reason they worked so hard to attain all this power was to have reproductive access to a greater variety of women and produce more heirs.
• Most creative people produce prolifically in their early adulthood and then settle down to enjoy the fruits of their labours, producing sporadically, if at all, after that. (This one is notable for Psychology Today calling out an ex-Beatle by boldly stating that “Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years.” Ouch. When you get called out by a psychology journal, you’ve been judged, homie.)
• Having sons reduced the risk of divorce because it’s by maintaining his wealth and land to pass on to his progeny that men can make a successful son. While no amount of land and wealth can keep your daughter young and pretty or stop her from giving it up to some dude with 22-inch rims and a sweet grill.

But this one, I found kind of fascinating, especially considering it was a woman who wrote the article (rather, the book the article was excerpted from):

Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Sexual harassment cases of the hostile-environment variety result from sex differences in what men and women perceive as “overly sexual” or “hostile” behavior. Many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male coworkers. Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected each other to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment.

Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men’s repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not treating women differently from men—the definition of discrimination, under which sexual harassment legally falls—but the opposite: Men harass women precisely because they are not discriminating between men and women.

I know that drawing conclusions from psychology research is like sketching the first draft of a cartoon — when it’s finally done, it’s going to look a little different than you planned, but you can at least hope to get the basics right — but I actually see this play out in my small office every day. (Not the sexual harassment per se, we’re right down the hall from Human Resources, after all). But our office is divided (and it wasn’t done this way on purpose, fairly close to along gender lines. But there are two exceptions, there is one man who has a desk in the middle of a circle of desks occupied by women. And there are two women who sit very close to me and four male co-workers in what has been dubbed ‘Manzone’.

The man who sits in the middle of the women has been — if not emasculated — toned down significantly. And one of the women who sits near us has become, over the three months we’ve been in this new office with this new seating plan, much cruder and more sexualized. That’s not to say that their core personalities have changed, because they haven’t really. But they’ve had to adapt their repartee and office yakking to fit in with those around them. (Hey look, I’m taking tiny sample sizes and extrapolating them to fit my conclusions … I’m on my way, baby!)

But really, nothing sums this idea up better than Homer Simpson:

“I engaged in sexual intercourse with your spouse or significant other … Now THAT’s Psychiatry! Eh? Eh?”

There are bad Christians and good Christians in this world. It’s tough to tell them apart sometimes, unless they’re American and willing to tell you who got their vote. They go to the same churches, believe in the same God and support the same damned sandal-wearing hippy that supposedly makes it possible for me to be a first-class asshole, repent, and still be cool with the Lord. Which is fine, and I thank Him for that.

The bad Christians, however, are a big part of what’s wrong with this part of the world. It’s not their fault, really. They’re just the sheep who follow the lambs who run straight at the wolf … and they are too indoctrinated to know any differently. They also seem to outnumber the good, openminded, genuinely caring Christians who aren’t pushing shit on anyone and just want to help make the world a better place before they shuffle off to everlasting life in paradise.

At first glance, however, filing out of a chapel, it’s impossible to make the distinction between the two. Unless you hand them a copy of Harry Potter…

The final book in the series is about two weeks away from bookstores, so it is time once again for the Bad Christians to ramp up rhetoric designed to keep children away from Satan’s Minions, who happen to attend Hogwarts and know some cool Latin phrases.

The 700 Club has outdone itself this time, putting together a handy website that allows Christian parents to discern exactly what they should do to confront the Potter menace. It would be too easy for me to make fun of them, so we’ll take them at face value and let them speak for themselves before I respond (or let the author respond for herself, in one case):

• Tolkien and Lewis, of course, were devout Christians. J.K. Rowling does not seem to be. In fact, we have no statements from her at all that would indicate that she has made a profession for Christ, that she defines God the same way that Christians define God, or that she views Jesus Christ in the same way. There is nothing.

(Well now, is JK Rowling a Christian? ”Yes, I am,” she says. ”Which seems to offend the religious right far worse than if I said I thought there was no God. Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.” That took less than 30 seconds to find, by the way.)

• The 700 Club asks: What Would Jesus Do With Harry Potter? (I am sure there is slash fiction out there that would describe in vivid detail exactly what Jesus would do with the lithe, supple 17-year-old wizard … but I digress). In fact, according to the author Jesus would:

1. Jesus might ask kids what they would see if they looked into the Mirror of Erised and listen attentively as they struggled to put into words the deepest desires of their hearts. (Isn’t that what Dumbledore did?)
2. He might compare the trustworthy goodness of Albus Dumbeldore to the infinitely superior goodness of God the Father, stressing that we can find the same kind of reassurance in God, and godly mentors, that Harry finds in his headmaster.
3. He might talk about how people walk by the door that leads to the “magical realm” of Hogwarts without ever noticing it for what it is, and compare that to how people pass by the entrance to God’s kingdom (Jesus, who is the door) without knowing what they are missing.

No. Clearly, as one can see from the above statements, what Jesus would really do with Harry Potter is … sue him for copyright infringement! It’s like Harry and Dumbledore have been illegally downloading God’s MP3s! Good Christians cannot stand for this. All they need is some way to instill horrible feelings of deep-seated betrayal guilt and a redemption arc, and then it’ll be exactly like the bible….

• “The Potter stories make it “cool” for kids to study the occult without acknowledging its satanic origins. They also make it seem like the only way to combat evil is through “good” magic, rather than by the power of God. Plus, the books themselves are published and promoted to schools by Scholastic books, a brand name that lends further “legitimacy” to the series.”

(It is ALWAYS “cool” for kids to “study the occult”, especially when they do so without acknowledging its satanic origins. I try to never acknowledge the “satanic origins” of anything I do. And you shoulda seen me last Friday night … man, I was “combatting evil” furiously … so furiously that I started chafing and has to stop after a while. I’m sorry, I don’t know where I was going with this one … but you better believe I was “published by Scholastic” lending me “further legitimacy”. I guess my point is that you can make anything sinister or amusing by putting quotations around it.)

The bottom line is that all this idiotic prosyletizing is the product of Bad Christians with too much desire to twist the world into their own fumbling, sefl-centred image of goodness and spirituality. They are living living embodiment of Reverend Lovejoy:

Ned: Homer, God didn’t set your house on fire.
Lovejoy: No, but He was working in the hearts of your friends and neighbors when they came to your aid, be they Christian, Jew, or…miscellaneous.
Apu: Hindu! There are 700 million of us.
Lovejoy: Aw, that’s super.

And they’re wreaking terrible damage on their children. And I honestly think that where Christians stand on Harry Potter is a very good (if not perfect) indicator on what kind of Christian they are. On the 700 Club site there is a page that features comments from parents and readers about how to deal with Harry Potter. The last two comments perfectly illustrate the schism between what Christianity has become far too frequently, and what it should have been in the first place. Somehow, I think Jebus would agree with the second comment enthusiastically:

PREPARING FOR ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ENEMY: I think your commentary is interesting. My children are older teens and so we have not had to address the Harry Potter issue personally. The only comment I would make is this: Using one book of the series under your guidence and direction to increase your children’s understanding and discernment of the occult could be very benificial in preparing them for any future encounters with the “enemy”. We are encouraged to know our enemy and his ways. The desire to read every book of the series would to me indicate deception of motives.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: If we rob our children of all fantasy what is this Christian world coming to? I’ve never read the Harry Potter books but I feel it may be much ado about nothing.

“If we rob our children of all fantasy what is this Christian world coming to?”

Enough said. You could take out the word Christian from that sentence and it would work even better, I think.

Yeah … it’s all Mr. Rogers’ fault that I’m an entitled jerk, along with the rest of my generation.

It couldn’t possibly be that recent generations have been coddled by parents who are afraid the kids will phone Child Services if they spank them.

It couldn’t possibly be the teachers, who are forced to push students through grades, whether they deserve to pass or not, because advancing kids through school determines their funding and they also don’t want to deal with Little Jimmy’s Asshole Parents.

It couldn’t be anyone else in children’s media who have essentially raised much of the last three generations of children.

Hell, why couldn’t it be Mr. Dressup? He taught me that the answers to all of life’s problems could be found in a Tickle Trunk, so why should I have to work for them?

Kids today — and, I suppose, even kids of my day — are spoiled, self-centred brats. I’m not going to argue with the WSJ on that count. I am not shocked at all that narcissism is rising among college students, that kids don’t see the need to work harder and instead they feel that, just like Mr. Rogers said, they’re “special just the way they are.”

But, like all idiot columnists (yes, even ones with a blog), the writer is looking for one simple solution on which to hang a very complex problem.

Instead of searching for reasons, he pegs it on the kids’ entertainer, and has a couple of professors say that Rogers is “representative of a culture of excessive doting.”

Oh! And he adds that it might be because some parents encourage their kids to call them by their first names. As if more than one-tenth of all the spoiled, sniveling little jerkwads in North America actually grew up this way. I didn’t care what Mom and Dad wanted me to call them, so long as they bought me those damn Transformers!

Why not this:

— Kids are jerks because they’re kids, and there isn’t anything standing in their way of becoming jerks.

When my parents were small, there were wars going on that affected the whole world (now the wars are the creations of the spoiled brats who see the Middle East as their sandbox that Daddy gave them). If there wasn’t a chance that their dad would come home in a box, then there was still a chance that nuclear warheads would rain death down on all of us. That sort of thing discourages gratuitous whinging.

— Kids believe that Bs and Cs are “just fine” because the President of the Fucking United States (the POTFUS) is a C student. And he’s doing fine “just the way he is”. And you don’t need Mr. Rogers to tell you that he’s ’special’.

— University age American children don’t work as hard as their Asian counterparts because — despite being young students, and thus sorta stupid — they can see that they don’t need to. The evidence is all around them. They already have the built-in advantage that being born into an upper middle-class white family (you don’t see black kids from the ghetto getting to university and then not working at their classes —except for the ones on athletic scholarships, and I guaran-damn-tee you they’re working hard at team practices) provides.

So yeah, we may have a culture of excessive doting, but that’s not exactly news. It isn’t fair, however, to lay it at the feet of a man who was on TV trying to entertain your kids for half an hour before school and make them good positive about themselves while doing it.

If Mr. Rogers was Mom and Dad to these overindulged little freaks, then I would maybe understand directing some blame his way. But the fact is that the real problem in this whole thing is that he was Mom and Dad to some of these children. But that’s not his fault. That blame goes squarely on the biological parents, who left it up to mr. Rogers to instill in their kids the shit they didn’t have time for.

Don’t hate on a man who loves children. Unless, you know, he actually loves children.