For the record, JKR turned in her manuscript to the publisher Christmas Day 2004...
I agree with her! Harry Potter Timeline
How "sadly misguided" of you to jump to the conclusion that that reference has ANYTHING to do with Bush, or even
Blair. Why would a REAL historical figure, especially Blair, be put into a book that is obviously fanstasy? You assume a lot.
Finished it in 10 hours. Bring on the next and final book! For those seeing Bush bashing in the cute first chapter I see rather bashing of politicians in general. The PM could be anyone (except Lady Thatcher!), and the peripherally referred to President could be from many countries. France is probably the most mentioned non-British country in the series and the US has hardly been mentioned at all in the series. What isn't vague is the attitude throughout the series towards politicians and government agencies, which could have been written by written by Reagan.
Your wretched .
The author could have been referring to the President of France, no?
Harry Potter is probably a Democrat.
I don't think she is as anti-President Bush as you think. After all, note that Rowling depicts the newspapers in the wizarding world somewhat poorly; remember Rita Skeeter Goblet of Fire (what a tattletale and then some!), Luna Lovegood from Order of the Phoenix (note how Luna is quite a bit embarassed by her father's scandal sheet newspaper at times), and how everyone more or less puts down The Daily Prophet in the latest novel.
It`s amazing this J.K. Rowling makes so much money on these Harry Potter books considering she ripped off the idea verbatim from a video game. I guess some companies just don`t believe in suing.
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=Spellcasting+201
Don't know if this was pointed out or not in here...
This current chapter of HP was to have taken place in 1997-98.
Clinton was in office.
But then again, it's also still a make-believe story. As a female was PM then.
If you seriously have nothing better to worry about than three words in a Harry Potter book, I envy your serene existence.
Why on earth would you assume it was Bush? I am sorry but this is just plain stupid!
Unless she has formidable magical powers of her own, Rowling couldn't have been writing the book for the last two years based on the headlines at the time of its release.
Let alone the last thirteen years, if you believe what Rowling says about that first chapter. Which I'm inclined to do. If I were Rwoling, as soon as I had the concept, I'd be thinking about the intersection of the wizard and muggle worlds, and how to make the suspension of disbelief plausible. She just couldn't work it into the narrative until now.
In the most rabid fan debate circles, there's a running debate over when the Harry Potter books are set. If Harry's first year is when Rowling first had the idea, then book six is still solidly in the Clinton years.
But that speculation is silly because the time is deliberately vague -- I don't recall much muggle technology more modern than telephones, power drills and toasters. There is an enchanted Ford Anglia, which means we're talking about the 50s at earliest. Something might have slipped from my memory, but I don't recall any computers, mobile phones, PDAs, or even digital watches and pocket calculators.
That's both wise marketing and an aesthetic decision. You don't need to be too specific or write anything that will get dated. Great juvenile fiction stands the test of time. Rowling's work could be at the same time as Roald Dahl's -- I've always thought the two were very similar -- though they were written decades apart.
But back to politics.
If you've finished the first chapter, it's difficult to see how you can see it as a partisan dig, no matter whom you assign to which role -- the Prime Minister is befuddled and largely ineffectual, the opposition leader an opportunist exploiting tragedy for political gain. No one is noble. It's an easy dig on all politicians, not an endorsement of any one over any other. And part of that general dismissal of politicians is that the PM is dreading a call from the "dreadful man" he smiles at and slaps on the back in public.
I haven't finished book 6 yet, so I'll focus on Book 5, in which it becomes obvious that Rowling is a pro-Bush Tory through and through.
(Spoiler space just in case folks haven't read book 5 yet)
A devious evil, which is obvously meant to represent Islamic terror, has risen. The bumbling feel-good bureaucrats in the Ministry of Magic (clearly the Clinton administraton) refuse to believe it until it strikes on their own soil, by which time it has infiltrated and corrupted the Ministry itself. They finally accept the truth, but only after many losses and even then they are equivocal and ineffective at fighting it until (in book 6) replaced by a hawkish leader.
Bottom line: It's kid fiction. Very, very good kid fiction, but if you squint hard enough you can find anything in it. It's a silly exercise, just as it is when some know-it-all college sophomore goes looking for exemples of Marxist dialectic in Hop on Pop.
Little early for that, I'd say.
What a stupid post. There are plenty of wretched presidents, including (for example) Robert Mugabe. You're free to read in a swipe at Bush if you want, but it's a pretty lame thing to do. (It's hard, for example, to call him the president of "a far distant land," which the US is not....)
Who's to say it isn't Chirac?
Well, it couldn't be Tony Blair and W, they are fast friends.
Well, just to keep things going, here's a new coment by Rowling on Chapter 1:
From: http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/extras/aa-jointerview2.html
MA: Yeah, chapter one, and current world events, specifically in the last four years. Terrorism and the like; has it factored into your writing, has it shaped your writing?
JKR: No, never consciously, in the sense that I've never thought, "It's time for a post-9/11 Harry Potter book," no. But what Voldemort does, in many senses, is terrorism, and that was quite clear in my mind before 9/11 happened. I was going to read last night [ie, do the midnight reading at the castle] from chapter one. That was the reading until the 7th of July [bombings in London]. It then became quite clear to me that it was going to be grossly inappropriate for me to read a passage in which the Muggle prime minister is discussing a mass Muggle killing. It just wasn't appropriate, as there are touches of levity in there. It was totally inappropriate, so that's when I had to change, and I decided to go for the joke shop, which is all very symbolic because, of course, Harry said to Fred and George, “I’ve got a feeling we’ll all be needing a few laughs before long.” It all ties together nicely. So no, not consciously, but there are parallels, obviously. I think one of the times I felt the parallels was when I was writing about the arrest of Stan Shunpike, you know? I always planned that these kinds of things would happen, but these have very powerful resonances, given that I believe, and many people believe, that there have been instances of persecution of people who did not deserve to be persecuted, even while we're attempting to find the people who have committed utter atrocities. These things just happen, it's human nature. There were some very startling parallels at the time I was writing it.