Some bright fellow going by the sobriquet Coffeeman recently composed a little pictorial essay to explain why people hate Dolores Umbridge (the officious power-hungry apparatchik in the Ministry of Magic) so much. It’s well worth reading. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
The Real Reason You Hate Umbridge So Much
During the school year, hardly a day goes by without some new story of teachers and/or administrators doing something incredibly stupid: ordering a lockdown because some idiot thought an umbrella was a gun, forcing a child to change his clothes because of a politically incorrect slogan, expelling a child for biting his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, confiscating a child’s lunch because it doesn’t meet Federal standards, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Then there are all the sexual predators: The invaluable Instapundit regularly features stories of female teachers arrested for sexual relations with their charges (and just as regularly notes that their punishments [if any] are mere shadows of those meted out to men guilty of the same offenses).
Umbridges, one and all.
Then there are the busybodies who deem themselves qualified to override parental choices, even to the point of removing their children from their care for the offense of letting them walk through their neighborhood without Mommy hovering over their shoulders.
Umbridges, one and all.
Then there’s the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (or, more accurately, “Housing and Urban Decay”), which is using a new rule they concocted called “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” the goal of which is to make every home and every neighborhood in the United States precisely like every other home and neighborhood. Because, after all, it’s unfair that people with more money have bigger homes than do people with less.
Umbridges, one and all.
In fact, Umbridgeousness is the natural condition of every government employee, and few indeed are those whose wages are paid by the taxes of their fellow citizens who do not arrive at the conviction that they are better, smarter, wiser people than those they work for and that they should by right have the power to regulate the lives of everyone else.
But Rowling’s Umbridge is not merely a petty tyrant, but a moral coward. She, like most of the rest of the Ministry of Magic, is unwilling to see the evil that threatens their world. Thus, instead of naming and facing the evil, she persecutes those who do.
Note that this is exactly the behavior of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry. They will not name the evils we face (Iran, Isis, and Jihadism in general); they will not face it; they will not do anything to prepare for the fight against it; they insult, belittle, and persecute those who can and do.
At bottom, then, the 2016 American election is not between Democrats and Republicans; it is between those who suffer from moral cowardice and the conviction that they know best (Cornelius Fudge and Dolores Umbridge) and those who have the moral strength to confront evil and the humility to know that they don’t know everything (Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore).
In our world, Dolores Umbridge wears a pantsuit.
