Dark arts

Once upon a time, a poor young woman sat in a café because it was warmer than her tiny flat.  With her baby at her side, she wrote and wrote, and soon she had completed a book about a boy wizard called Harry.  One company after another declined to publish the book.  At last, a small publisher accepted it, but insisted that she use her initials, because boys would not want to read a book by someone called Joanne.  The book went unnoticed at first, but soon boys and girls were telling their friends what a wonderful book it was.  The publisher brought out one edition after another, and soon it was being read by grownups as well.  The young woman, no longer poor, began to write another book about Harry, and another and another.  People in far-off lands began to read the books.  Other people paid large sums of money for the right to make the stories into films starring the kinds of actors who are called "Sir" and "Dame."  A theme park was built.  And it all began with one poor young woman who could spin words, if not straw, into gold.  Some say she is the richest woman in the world.

But one day, an organization run by senescent Incels and known as the Roman Catholic Church became frightened by the woman and her imagination.  In a place called Nashville, the pastor of St. Edward Catholic School ordered the books removed from his library because they scared him.
After consulting several exorcists, because that is still a twenty-first century profession, he said, "The curses and spells used in the book are actual curses and spells, which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text."  He did not say how he knew this, and because he is very silly as well as evil, he will not get his name mentioned here.  Neither will I say his name out loud, lest he appear before me, which nobody wants.

He is not as silly and evil as the priests in Poland who burned the books about the wizard last spring.  Poland does not have a constitution which guarantees both freedom of religion and freedom of the press, or if it has, nobody pays any attention to it.  (Burning books is a thing which used to be very common in Europe, together with burning people.  A poet called Heinrich Heine believed these activities to be intimately linked.)  But here in America, of which Tennessee is a part, banning books for magical reasons is both silly and evil, even if it encourages students to seek them out elsewhere.  And no one can ban the movies, which are shown on television every week.

The Catholic Church is founded on the premise that words have magical power, that a special wizard called a "priest" can use words to turn bread and wine into the body of a long-dead rabbi; absolve people of guilt for all manner of things, including murder; protect newborn babies from the awful consequences of being born; and transform dead celebrities like Mother Teresa into demigods called "saints."  Not surprisingly, it has a long history of acting foolishly about books.  Probably it has overreacted to children's books before.  I'm sure it isn't happy about, for example, Cinderella's fairy godmother.  I'd like to think the pastor of St. Edward is haunted by the Library of Unseen University, with its volumes so potent with magic that they have to be chained to the shelves, heaving and groaning.  But something tells me he's not a Terry Pratchett fan, either.  If he were, he'd remember that the Librarian is an ape.  By choice.

Ook.