Seeing as the first of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” movies will be coming out shortly, I made it a point to re-read the series and just finished the last book yesterday.

What strikes me, with this longer break in reading the books, is how marvelously subversive the series really is. I mean, straight out, in the first book, we have Hagrid’s warning: “Not all wizards are good” which translates in YA speak to also mean: “Not all adults are good.”

It gets better in the following books with Goblet of Fire being the book that makes it plain that you shouldn’t necessarily trust the Press to be fair and unbiased, then with Order of the Phoenix showing how the judicial system can be subverted for political ends, then in Half-Blood Prince where we discover that the government is often more interested in appearances than facts.

If J.K. Rowling has an enduring legacy, it is this legacy of questioning authority. The first book came out over twelve years ago and a generation has grown up with them, a new generation will doubtless also find them fascinating (they read differently when you’ve got all of them at once, instead of having to wait for the next book) – and the first generation is now entering the workforce in large numbers. I wonder how this questioning background of theirs will impact us all? For that matter, how much did Harry Potter affect the US 2008 election?