The greatest blog post in history

Recently a lawyer for conspiracy theory-loving radio host Alex Jones described Jones' on-air persona as "performance art." I just have to ask: is anyone really surprised?

On the other hand, I'll tell you something I heard recently that did throw me. According to Jon Meacham's 2015 biography of George H.W. Bush, in 1988 Donald Trump went to Lee Atwater to be asked to be considered for Bush's running mate. Bush thought the request "strange and unbelievable."

This little anecdote should put to rest a belief about Trump that a lot of people (including me) have long held. Trump has been making nods to possible presidential runs for over 30 years. Even now, the conventional wisdom is that all those previous times (and possibly even the 2016 one, initially at least) were intended as publicity stunts. And when he finally became an official candidate in 2015, the Huffington Post decided to run all its articles about him under "entertainment," a move even I found ridiculous at the time.

But now it turns out that Trump went privately to seek a vp spot from the GOP nominee in 1988. It wasn't a public pronouncement; it was entirely behind the scenes, and the most striking thing about it was that it was in pursuit of a position that's supposed to be one of the most thankless roles in politics, basically the president's lackey. It would seem a most un-Trumpian thing to do unless we assume he really was serious, all those years ago, about wanting to get to the White House.

Why is it so hard for so many of us to wrap our heads around that fact? It's because Trump, like Alex Jones, always comes off sounding like a performance artist. It's like we've become so jaded over the years, we just assume by default that any celebrity with a bombastic, over-the-top persona must be doing a kind of act. Thus, it comes as a surprise to discover they may be in earnest.

Trump has been described as a narcissist, and while that is self-evidently true, in a way it misses the point. The fact is that few narcissists behave the way Donald Trump does. It is one thing to believe you are the greatest person alive. It is quite another to believe that the most effective way to convince others you're the greatest person alive is by boldly declaring it to be so at every opportunity. That would be the equivalent of a comedian who laughs at his own jokes.

In 2011 he told an audience, "if I decide to run, you'll have the great pleasure of voting for the man that will easily go down as the greatest president in the history of the United States: Me, Donald John Trump." In 2015, he said, "I'm the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. Nobody's ever been more successful than me." A report allegedly written by Trump's personal physician declared that Trump would be the "healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."

In December a press release by the Trump team went, "The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history." (It was actually the 11th smallest.) A few weeks ago he said, "I think we’ve had one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency." (Spoiler: he didn't.) And to top it off, there was his July 2016 interview on 60 Minutes, which featured the following exchange:

LESLEY STAHL: You're not known to be a humble man. But I wonder --

DONALD TRUMP: I think I am, actually humble. I think I'm much more humble than you would understand.

Well, of course. Since he's the greatest human being ever to walk the face of the earth, by definition he must also be the most modest. A man who has surpassed Lincoln in presidential greatness has surely eclipsed Moses in humility.

You know what? I think I've finally figured out who Donald Trump really is. It's coming to me...just give me a second. Here it is:

Yup, Gilderoy Lockhart. The Harry Potter character from Chamber of Secrets who constantly talks about how great a sorcerer he is, who claims to have vanquished numerous dark wizards, who has several books to his name detailing his achievements, who hawks products of questionable quality, who grins and smirks a lot, and who of course is finally exposed as a fraud--a man who takes credit for the achievements of others, as should have been painfully obvious to anyone with a grain of common sense but which somehow escaped the attention of the school administrators who hired him.

You might think it strange of me to be comparing a US president to a comic relief character from a series of children's books, but that's just the point. Trump isn't a standard vain person. He's a cartoon caricature of a vain person, more like the villain from a Disney flick than someone actually existing in the real world. And perhaps the weirdest thing about the Trump phenomenon isn't that so many people believe in him, it's that he apparently believes in himself.

Harry Potter, the jock

I'm sure I'm not the first to have noticed, but quidditch, the imaginary sport from the Harry Potter books, probably wouldn't work very well in the real world even if you had all the technology needed to make the game physically possible--including flying broomsticks, and a ball with a mind of its own.

In this game, each team has a group of players called Chasers who try to get a ball through the other team's goalpost. Of course every team has a goalie. This would all sound like soccer on broomsticks were it not for a couple of really exotic elements. First, there's a heavy, enchanted object called a bludger which tries to knock players off their broomsticks. To protect the players, each team has special players called Beaters, armed with a club for batting away bludgers.

The trouble is, nothing the Chasers, the Beaters, or the goalies do has any effect in moving the game toward its conclusion. A team could go on scoring goals forever, and the game wouldn't end even if the score was 440-0. A team's ultimate fate rests entirely with one player, the Seeker, whose task is to catch a tiny enchanted object called the Golden Snitch which only appears on occasion and tries to elude the Seeker's grasp. Once the Seeker catches the Snitch, his or her team earns 150 extra points and the game ends. Usually his or her team then wins the game. Only if that team is more than 150 points behind at the moment the Snitch is caught does the team lose. One of the later Harry Potter books (I can't remember which) depicts such a game.

Quidditch therefore has one fundamental flaw: the Chasers, who make up the majority of the players and whose actions dominate most of what happens, have a very weak incentive for scoring goals. As long as they manage to remain within 150 points of the other team, they are in little danger of losing. The score could be 140-0, and the team that hasn't scored could still easily win. Most likely, a typical quidditch team would hardly score at all, focusing its energy simply on preventing the other team from scoring.

To compensate for this all-too-obvious flaw, teams get ranked according to points scored rather than number of games won. But that makes it heavily dependent on record-keeping between games. You'd have to commit yourself in advance to playing many games for it to have any impact. It's not the type of sport that lends itself to casual play in the backyard.

In our world, most team sports revolve around one very simple formula: one team tries to relocate a small object (a ball, a puck, etc.), and the other team tries to stop it. That's it. Right there you have the basic description of soccer, hockey, baseball, football, basketball, volleyball, and lacrosse. Soccer and hockey are almost moronically simple games. Baseball and American football have intricate rules of progression, and baseball (along with its cousins such as cricket) is slightly unconventional in that a team's ultimate objective involves the movement of players rather than the movement of the ball. None of these games, however, allow more than one ball on the field at a time, much less more than one type of ball. And a game where regular scoring doesn't count for anything more than a team's record is hard to imagine. In sports, complexity is not necessarily a virtue.

The Potter books, nonetheless, make quidditch out to be the most dazzlingly exciting sport in the history of mankind, far surpassing any of the familiar earth-bound ballgames. No other wizard sport ever gets mentioned, suggesting the wizarding world is quite satisfied with this one. Most readers consider it one of the charms of the series, an example of J.K. Rowling's enduring creativity. Somehow it's fun to read about, even if the rules are probably too unwieldy for it to work in the real world.

Whether it's fun to watch is less clear. Only the first two movies show the game in detail, and the fourth and fifth movie don't show the game at all. The novelty of seeing the magical sport on screen makes it interesting at first. After that, there's little suspense to be generated, apart from hoping Harry doesn't get hit by a bludger. As a Seeker, most of what he does during any game is sit around waiting for the Snitch to appear. As for the other players, since they do not determine the game's ultimate fate, what's the point in watching them play? (It's no wonder the films so often show cheating and other disturbances; they aren't confident the game will be interesting on its own terms.)

Had Rowling eliminated the business with the Seeker and the Snitch, quidditch would be more believable. It would be like soccer in three dimensions rather than two, similar to what Orson Scott Card envisioned in his novel Ender's Game, in which child soldiers conduct simulated space battles in a null-G environment. But the Golden Snitch is just enough to put quidditch over the top as something truly otherworldly. If all the game consisted of was players trying to score goals, it would quickly begin to sound mundane once the novelty of their flying on broomsticks wore off. The bludgers add a level of danger you don't associate with high school athletics, and the Snitch makes the game unlike anything you've heard of.

Quidditch is really part of the whole mystique of the Harry Potter series. In a world where magic dominates and where broken limbs can be mended within seconds, physical prowess is a lot less valued than in our "muggle" world. That's why a kid who looks to us like a class-A dork can get to be the star of his school's sports team. That's why girls can play along with the boys, without anyone turning their head. That's why even the school bully is a pint-sized kid. But considering that the magic in these books is a lot like advanced technology, one must ask: isn't this where our own society is headed?

The ubiquitous PG-13 rating

Recently, I watched The Golden Compass and later discovered it was rated PG-13. This surprised me, not just because it's a children's movie, but also because it had very little violence in it and no other objectionable content. I had to wrack my brains to figure out how it had gotten so high a rating, and finally I remembered a scene in which a CGI bear rips the jaw off another CGI bear--though it happens so quickly I bet many people won't understand what they just saw. The film is considerably less violent than any of the first three Harry Potter movies, all of which received PG ratings.

Last week, I saw Live Free or Die Hard on DVD, and I had a choice whether to watch the theatrical PG-13 version, or an unrated version with extra content. I opted for the PG-13 version due to my superstitious belief that anything not shown in the theater isn't part of the "real" movie.

Still, just hearing it had a PG-13 was a red flag for me, since the other Die Hard films all have R ratings. Not surprisingly, this is the first Die Hard movie I haven't liked at all. While the film had several other problems, I suspect it's hard to make a good film with the MPAA breathing down your back.

Evidently, they made the film with R level of content, then shaved off just enough material to get a PG-13. These sorts of deals between the studio and the MPAA are basically acts of bargaining rather than the application of consistent standards. The final version is as violent as many R-rated films I have seen, with several moments in which characters get shot and blood spurts from their wounds.

We've reached an absurd situation when The Golden Compass has the same rating as Live Free or Die Hard. Somewhere along the line, after theaters began tightening their standards, studios decided that PG-13 was the most bankable rating, and pretty soon all sorts of movies were being shoved into it, artistic integrity be damned.

I have a couple of suggestions. First, stop allowing filmmakers to bargain down the ratings they receive. Second, get rid of ratings that make no difference to theaters. As far as theaters are concerned, only three categories really matter: movies that anyone may be admitted to see, movies that people under 17 may be admitted to see with a guardian, and movies that people under 17 may not be admitted to see. The G, PG, and PG-13 all fall in the first category. Their only purpose is informative, but that role has practically been rendered obsolete by sites like Screen It!, which provides parents with detailed information about the content in every film. If the MPAA wants the standards enforced, maybe they should leave the job of guidance and recommendation to other sources, which tend to be far better at it, anyway.

The myth of the fantasy genre

Sometimes viewpoints that are dead wrong can provide a starting point for insightful discussions. I feel that way about Christian opponents of the Harry Potter series. They think it's bad to expose children to stories depicting witchcraft in a positive light. Fans respond that Harry Potter is fantasy, and that these books are a healthy tool for stimulating a child's imagination.

"Fantasy" is a funny name for a genre. The word suggests make-believe. All fiction is make-believe, but fantasy deals specifically with events that not only didn't happen, but couldn't happen. We, the readers, allow our minds to enter a universe that we know could never exist. The books tap into some part of our subconscious where rationality has not penetrated, and for a brief period of time we "believe" in magic. The genre is not about exploring possibilities, as science fiction does, but about losing ourselves in impossibilities. As Orson Scott Card puts it in his 1990 book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, "science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be" (p. 22).

But that raises a problem. If we designate all supernatural stories as fantasy, as is the common practice, we're implying that there's no such thing as the supernatural. I presume that Card, as a Mormon, would resist that implication. Yet he doesn't appear bothered by it: "As rational people, we know that magic doesn't work and superstitions are meaningless" (p. 22). True, but what about the miracles of the Bible? What about God and the afterlife?

The fantasy genre avoids this dilemma because it rarely deals with religion. Magic may be rooted in pagan belief, but most fantasies do not feature pagan deities. Two important pioneers of the genre--J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis--were devout Christians. (J.K. Rowling is, too, but let that pass.) I once saw someone make the following clueless remark about Harry Potter: "Why do the kids celebrate Christmas if they practice witchcraft?" But that's just the point. The magic in Harry Potter isn't a religion; it is an alternative series of natural laws. It has about as much to do with ancient occult practice as Westerns have to do with the real Old West. And it has about as much to do with Satan worship as armadillos have to do with Swiss cheese.

The fantasy genre, in any case, centers on things that almost everyone agrees are imaginary, like elves and dragons. Religiously rooted supernatural fiction, like The Exorcist, usually ends up in the horror section of a bookstore. People may call it fantasy, but that's not the publishing category. Fantasy, despite its religious origins, is essentially a very secular genre. Individual works like C.S. Lewis's Narnia series may express religious ideas, but mostly through metaphor.

Does a book even need magic to be considered fantasy? The Princess Bride has no obvious magical elements, unless you consider a volcanic swamp populated by ferocious capybaras to be magical. As for Miracle Max, he's an herbalist, not a sorcerer, and he doesn't show up until quite late in the story. Yet everybody thinks of The Princess Bride as a fantasy, largely because it has all the trappings of one.

The matter gets even fuzzier with books that deal with the afterlife, like Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come, which I discussed in a previous post. Wikipedia classifies such novels as "bangsian fantasy," after an author named John Kendrick Bangs. But the thing is, Matheson actually believed in what he wrote. He based his depiction of afterlife on extensive research into near-death experiences and the visions of mystics. To him, and to many readers, his book is surely not "fantasy."

Card hints that the genre designation does have something to do with what people actually believe about the world. For example, are The Iliad and The Odyssey fantasies? No, says Card, because they were written at a time when most people believed in such stuff. What about the Bible or Paradise Lost? Card prudently remarks that even today many people "would be outraged to hear of either being classified as fantasy" (p. 18).

Even science fiction isn't immune to this dilemma. I have heard George Lucas described as a "modern mythmaker." But myths are what a culture actually believes in. People do not go to Star Wars to see a world they believe is real. Rather, Lucas takes the myths of the past and spins them into entertainment which modern audiences accept on a purely symbolic level. In a sense, that's what all fantasy writers do. If we could see what future societies will think of our own, we might be surprised at what they consider our myths and our fantasies.

Clever translations

When visiting Israel a few years ago, I purchased a Modern Hebrew translation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the fifth in the series, and the source of the latest movie). My Hebrew skills are at a level where I can understand snippets of dialogue, while having much more trouble with the general text. But what interested me was comparing it with the English version. I quickly learned that the translator must exercise some imagination in conveying ideas that can't be understood through literal translation.

The first question that occurred to me was how the translator handled puns. Because puns exploit word pairs that sound alike but have different meanings, they usually are language-specific. Therefore, they cannot be translated directly. Take the following passage from Chapter Seven:

"And don't take too long, Weasley, the delay on that firelegs report held our investigation up for a month."

"If you had read my report you would know that the term is 'firearms,'" said Mr. Weasley coolly.

This exchange depends on the double meaning of arms. Unfortunately, Hebrew has no word that means both weapons and limbs. What the translation does is make Mr. Weasley's report about ekdichay yad (אקדחי יד), or handguns, and the confused wizard calls them ekdichay regel (אקדחי רגל): "footguns." This gets the same point across as in the original--the wizard's ignorance of technology--and creates an equally outlandish image. But it doesn't involve the same level of wordplay.

In other instances, the translation does manage to retain the wordplay of the original book. For example, in the English version Hermione starts a club called Society for the Promotion of Elf Welfare, or S.P.E.W. The Hebrew translation gets lucky on this one, rendering the club's name almost word for word, with the resulting acronym sounding very close to the the Hebrew word for "allergy"!

At least the Hebrew version preserves most of the character names from the original. Many other Harry Potter translations don't. When I posted the "footguns" example on a language list, someone wrote back to me that the Norwegian version changes Dumbledore's name to Humlesnurr. The reason given is that the name Dumbledore comes from a British dialect word for "bumblebee," and humle is Norwegian for "bumblebee," while snurr means "to whirr."

I have no idea how often translators find sensible solutions to these kinds of problems. Puns and wordplay are only the beginning of the challenges. Good translations stand on their own as works in their own right. But they may overstep their boundaries by improving on the original work. One Israeli teenager told Haaretz that he considers the Hebrew version of Order of the Phoenix superior to the English version. That is not necessarily a compliment.

The genius of J.K. Rowling

While I always enjoyed the Harry Potter books, my admiration for them grew over time. I first heard about them in 1998, when my mother described them to me as the adventures of a group of nerdy kids who are also wizards. It sounded like the typical book my mother likes to read, but as the series increased in popularity and a fourth book awaited publication in 2000, I decided to read the first three.

I remember my first night reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I was reminded of Roald Dahl, one of my favorite authors as a kid. All the ingredients were there: the child who lives a cruel life and is then granted a journey into a wonderful magical world; the wretched characters who eventually get their comeuppance; and the bizarre types of candy that are right out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

But I also noticed some differences. Not only was the scantly illustrated book at a much higher reading level than Dahl's fiction, the story itself was far more sophisticated than the modern fairy tales for which Dahl is famous. Rowling's writing is never condescending; it never explains straight out the rules of the magical world. Like an adult fantasy book, it allows readers to figure out these rules for themselves as the story progresses. The first chapter may even confuse children with its bewildering sequence of strange events that only gradually become understandable.

The surprise ending caught me off guard. In hindsight, it didn't seem like an original idea. But I simply wasn't expecting such a twist. Having associated the novel in my mind with Roald Dahl's fiction, I took all the characterization to be black and white. I thought I had the characters pegged, but their motives turned out to be more complex than I had initially assumed.

The first book remains my favorite of the series, with the next three close in line. But the fifth and sixth have not pleased me as much. They get bogged down in plot mechanics and have less of the delightful humor that characterized the earlier books. I know there are many fans who prefer the later books, but personally I think this reflects people's attachment to the unfolding storyline. Everyone wants to know what will happen next.

At first, I did not accept the popular idea that the Harry Potter books are classics. I considered them good entertainment, but hardly groundbreaking. The premise of the series, in which kids attend a school for witches and wizards, seems to lack the uniqueness of true fantasy classics like The Wizard of Oz and Lord of the Rings.

Though the broad sketch of Harry Potter is fairly conventional, the details are incredible in their scope. They bring to life a magical society that exists within our own "muggle" world and that is kept secret by a bureaucracy with its own rules, history, and politics. Rowling's approach differs from that of traditional fantasy, which typically takes place in a medieval type of setting. Even when fantasies are set in modern times, as in Charles De Lint's "urban fantasies," the magic itself is still rooted in the past. Rowling's magical world resembles an advanced technological society. But because that society is fueled by magic and not by science, she has more freedom than a science fiction writer, who is less likely to envision a future where people communicate through owls rather than through telephones. This flexibility makes it easier for us to believe in the story's assortment of creatures from classical mythology and medieval folklore. Rowling, who studied classical literature in college, gives these beings a feeling of reality that is missing from most fantasy books.

But the intricacy of Rowling's world cannot fully explain the popularity of the series. If people love the books, it is in part because they love the characters, who are drawn with a surprising level of realism. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are not high school stereotypes but fully fleshed out characters with many distinctive traits. Harry may look like a nerd, but he's brave, quick-thinking, and altruistic. He also has several flaws. Hagrid may seem on the surface like the standard "dumb giant," but he's more nuanced than that. We get to know these characters inside out as the series progresses. Not all the characters are well drawn. The main villain, Voldemort, always seems vague and generic. But some of the other menacing figures are fascinating, like the ever-elusive Snape, whose true nature has yet to be explained.

The books also have a strong satirical undercurrent aimed at schools, the media, and politicians. The first book contains the following amusing line: "Professor McGonagall watched [her students] turn a mouse into a snuffbox--points were given for how pretty the snuffbox was, but taken away if it had whiskers." The later books lampoon tabloid reporters and obtuse educators, and the sixth book seems to comment indirectly on the War on Terror, though I'm sure that wasn't a part of Rowling's original plan for the series.

One of the most overlooked qualities of the series is the clever plotting. The plots are better crafted than most cinematic thrillers. Rowling never cheats by creating a surprise that doesn't fit the earlier events. I suspect that she had worked out the outline of the entire series before she had published even the first book. As each new layer of the story gets uncovered, I am astonished at how well it meshes with everything that came before.

In this regard, the sixth (and most recent) book is particularly interesting. I have found that readers have two entirely different interpretations of the ending. I suppose we will find out which one is correct as soon as Rowling releases the seventh (and presumably final) novel. This is one of several plot mysteries in the series that explore the theme of how people are too judgmental, making assumptions about other people before knowing all the facts. Harry is unfairly judged by people who put too much stock into rumors, yet he himself misjudges other characters. The plot twists which emphasize this theme are not simply manipulation; they contain lessons about human nature.

Will Rowling provide a satisfying conclusion to the series? I don't see any reason why not. She has shown an absolute mastery over this genre. That's what I failed to grasp when I first thought her books unoriginal. I've since come to the conclusion that it's much less important where artists get their ideas as the way they handle them. I'll take Rowling's finely executed novels any day over an original but sloppily written work.