A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

WHY I'M GLAD I'M NOT A WIZARD, BY A MUGGLE: At incredibly Jewish day camp today, one Jewish son of this non-Jew went looking for his ruach -- either his spirit or a traditional crescent-shaped pastry, don't ask me -- at a camp-created recreation of that holiest of Jewish places, Hogwarts. Children locating their Jewish identity were rewarded with essentially unwashable Sharpie tattoos of spectacles and the Devil's brand lightning-bolt scars. The kid was ecstatic. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it's much better to be a muggle than to be a wizard. Consider the plight of the magically inclined:

The government sucks. Right now, nobody likes our two-party system. You know who would love our two-party system? Participants in the wizarding world's no-party system. In seven years among relatively engaged Hogwarts students, we witnessed exactly zero elections. The world is just run by incompetent career bureaucrats who lived through an epochal war between good and evil yet refuse to take precautions against another one unless goaded into action by a sky-eclipsing smoke tattoo. And even then, Plan A is "piss pants until some teenagers figure something out." As far as I can tell, the English wizarding government is comprised of a central administration and four coequal subsidiary branches: security, primary education, prophecy storage, and operation of after-hours public transportation. But you can't improve the government, because nobody can give the government a critical thought. Why?

The education system sucks. There are three schools in the entire wizarding world. If you live in Asia, Africa, Australia, or the Americas and are born a wizard, figure it out yourself. If you live in Eastern Europe and are a girl, figure it out yourself. If you live in France, figure it out yourself -- unless you're a hot girl, because the hot French girls have their own school. If you live in England, you're lucky. You don't have to be hot or to have the other kind of wand. You get to spend seven years under the tutelage of an ancient and powerful wizard whose educational toolbox includes such tricks as "make a point and induce lifelong guilt by letting one student try to kill me while another student fails to prevent my death," "host sporting event that endangers lives of both participants and their loved ones then act shocked when student dies," and "repeatedly withhold potentially life-saving information from favorite student." Kids keep dying or almost dying, and the rest of the students are just like "Cor! Another one! Blimey! I'm right knackered of all this bloody codswallop!" At the end of your seven years, congratulations. You've learned no science, no math, no English, no civics, no foreign language, no art. You read and calculate at a fifth-grade level and know nothing of the world you share with the muggles, or even how your own government functions. On the other hand, you've learned about nine spells, which is perfect if your job is making things float or dispensing temporary paralysis. But don't worry about your job, because:

The economy sucks. The largest industry in the wizarding world, by orders of magnitude, is government. The second-largest is putting on the Quidditch World Cup. The third largest is inheriting money from your dead relatives. There is no credit and no paper currency -- you pay for everything with gold coins. The Weasleys, with all those kids and just government jobs to support them, are poor, and Ron has to make do with hand-me-down and hand-made clothes and a rat instead of an owl. Hermione, whose muggle parents have no wizarding gold and no way to get any, apparently steals her fashionable clothes and school supplies. Why aren't there any jobs? Probably because of the slave economy, which reminds me:

Race relations suck. I don't mean race relations as we think of them (though, come to think of it, name me a black girl or an Asian boy or a Jewish kid at Hogwarts). As everybody knows, it took a muggle-born tween with some familiarity with the American civil rights movement to introduce to the millenia-old wizarding world the concept that elf slavery is wrong. It didn't take. And it's not just the elves. The centaurs got themselves stuck sharing a reservation in the forest with the giant spiders. The only (half-) giant ever to matriculate at Hogwarts was an easy scapegoat for the misdeeds of a regular wizard. And I'm not sure how to put this delicately, but the wizarding financial industry is controlled by an insular tribe of money-obsessed short creatures with hooked noses? Charming.

Look, it would be nice to ride a broom, especially if one didn't need to ride it in English weather. And it would be nice to have the dishes do themselves and accio remote/keys/phone when one is balancing a bowl of popcorn on one's stomach. I'm just saying that the game isn't worth the candle -- the lummos isn't worth the wand -- that's all.