'Harry' And The Nation of Dweebs

At some point Tuesday, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" ka-chinged itself beyond $105 million or so in box office receipts, a new land speed record. The entire nation is officially, helplessly besotted. Young and old -- we all love Harry. All that magic! All that imagination! Whee!

Enough. Here is a warning flare that is long overdue:

America, your kids have become major dweebs.

This has to be said, quick, before the apparently also hotly anticipated movie version of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" comes out next month. (Tolkien again? Hobbits? More sorcery? It's as if the entire nation poured itself a glass of milk and went down to the basement to play Dungeons & Dragons.)

The crisis is rooted in a decade of geek ascendancy: We spent the 1990s worshiping the techno-barons -- Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos. People went to fertility clinics and demanded nerd sperm -- they wanted genuine seed from MIT engineers, Nobel-nominated scientists, concert pianists; anyone but pro athletes, career politicians, corporate sharks.

We told our children that it was best to be smart, kind, open-minded -- and yes, that was a good thing. We encouraged their obsessions with dinosaurs, planetary physics, recycling, the trombone, mathletics, Achievement Camp. But it went too far. Is it any wonder that kids today come out so incredibly dorky, that Harry Potter would be the 21st-century version of cool?

First, let's not miss a chance to blame England. The empire strikes back: It's now perfectly okay to show up to school wearing round, tape-fixed glasses and a wizard's cape, waving a wand and talking in a precocious British accent about Hogwarts and muggles and Quidditch. And get this -- you will not be pummeled at the first bell of recess. In fact, you'll be joined by the rest of your classmates. You will all run around the safety-tested jungle gym doing battle with imaginary trolls, pretending to fly on your broomsticks.

When did this happen? Where are the kids who are supposed to be beating up the kids who like Harry Potter? Where is the bully who is going to tell them what kinda dorkface fairies they're being? Where are the kids who don't like to read?

To review and watch the enthusiastic press coverage of the Harry Potterizing of America, you would believe that author J.K. Rowling's derivative fantasy books have saved us from nearly toppling into a pit of illiteracy. The parental enthusiasm for Harry Potter feels like those "My Kid Is an Honor Student at . . ." bumper stickers on every minivan in town. (Operative words: my kid. My kid is reading a book!)

Rather than simply be viewed as successful fantasy novels for children (you heard me, for children), the Harry Potter books are credited with getting children to read, welcomed into the curricula, fetishized at Halloween. (Rowling is rued only by a small swath of the religious right, who, 300 years later, still have witchcraft issues.) The movie's premiere last Friday was seen as a perfect excuse to sign the kids out of school for the day; some classes even took field trips to the megaplex.

No one seems concerned, yet, that these kids are reading the same four Harry Potter books over and over and over, which can't last forever. Even Nancy Drew peters out when readers hit a certain age. Sooner or later the kids will find Mom's copy of "My Secret Garden" in the nightstand drawer, or the Playboy stack Dad has hidden behind the workbench, and at last, that Gap Kids innocence is lost. They will grow up, fly business class and read Tom Clancy novels over and over and over . . .

But back to the problem: What to do with a nation of little nerds running around with capes and wands? Should we be more concerned? Is there a coolness shortage coming?

Yes. Kids who are this self-satisfied and fairy-tale-obsessed cannot be good news for the future of angry art, biting comedy or radical politics. Worse, it could foretell a spoiled-brat pandemic: The Harry Potter phenomenon is a symptom of what happens when every child is told that he or she is very special.

Let's also not miss a chance to blame the baby boomers, who gave birth to Generation Harry. Rowling's epic is really just a metaphor for what happens when you are taken out of your humdrum, average environment and put into the "gifted" category; Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, after all is said and done, appears to be just another under-integrated private school in the suburbs. (I count two black kids among the movie's extras; one has dreadlocks so we can be extra sure of his specialness. This only reinforced a certain -- how to say this -- Bethesda vibe that the Harry Potter craze gives off. It's all quite white, in the end, which almost always portends blandness.)

Rowling hasn't yet dealt with what exactly the parents go through to get their kids into Hogwarts, but it can't be pretty. Harry's parents had to die, after all -- when we see them in the movie, as ghostly images in a mirror, they look like they belong in the checkout line at Fresh Fields.

The tofu took. Generation Harry -- some of them, at least -- are the babies who, still womb-bound, were played Chopin through Walkman headphones stretched across Mommy's belly. These are the kids whose nannies spoke French; who were fed pesticide-free apple slices while they watched multiple viewings of gentle, ballad-drenched pap like "Beauty and the Beast." They've been driven around the suburbs from dance lessons to soccer practice in oversize vehicles purchased explicitly for their safety and comfort. They're told again and again that nobody is like them, and yet, everyone is important.

They each identify with Harry. Hence a nation of remarkably behaved, oddly irritating children who all look and talk less like the punks of tomorrow and more like aspiring members of the youth orchestra, winners of the science fair.

And these kids are picky, picky. Apparently no one has yet told them the Hollywood fact of life -- the movie is never as good as the book. Thus we've been treated in the past few days to their kind of cute, dogmatic redaction-geschichte of the film's various narrative shortcuts.

It's difficult to think of a time, in recent pop culture terms, when nerdishness triumphed so solidly. Nobody ever wanted to be Potsie; all the kids wanted to be Fonzie. Both "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" had their attendant hard-core geek acolytes -- pimply, possibly heavyset high school chicks showing up to movie theaters with Princess Leia hair buns in 1980; whole platoons of Klingons hanging out at the convention center, etc. -- but those were stupid movies. (Oh, but they were. They were gloriously, perfectly stupid and required no advance reading, only popcorn.)

What makes "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" so much more of a rare event to our culture than, say, "Return of the Jedi" is that it's meant for smart kids. The movie's penultimate action sequence involves a giant chess match. (Chess!?) It has that whole boarding school, striped rep necktie aesthetic about it. It has a vocabulary that demands attentiveness to detail. It's slow. It's boring.

It's huge.

And in its broad-based hugeness, even more puzzling. At a matinee Monday (a school day, correct?) the Uptown Theater in Cleveland Park was packed with children and their parents, and it seemed the parents were as agog with the Potter universe as anyone.

Adults like Harry Potter, which possibly undoes the last four decades of rebellion-based youth culture. Will these kids, in a few years, continue to share tastes with Mom and Dad? America's dweeb offspring have grown up in households where the parents are desperate consumers of mass culture -- their own and their children's -- trying to dig whatever's diggable about Eminem, trying to grok the PlayStation, keeping current, keeping fit. These are the households that propelled "The Beatles 1" to the top of the charts last year; they're raising four-eyed overachievers who preach Rowling's updated version of "All You Need Is Love." (Which happens to be the last line of the movie, in so many words.)

A spell has been cast, and it has turned subculture hipness into an ugly toad. Generation Harry has waved its wand at old concepts of elitism, popularity, unattainable sexiness -- not to to mention good old-fashioned PE locker room evil -- and dispensed it in a cloud of smoke.

"But have you read the books?" adults keep imploring to the cynical few. "You have to read the books."

Sorry. Much too busy trying to peel the Oprah sticker off my copy of "The Corrections." The next grown-up caught promoting Harry Potter to the rest of us better be ready to meet outside, after school, by the playground fence. Harry Potter is about a lot of things, and most of all he's about needing his butt kicked.

Hank Stuever is a staff writer for The Washington Post's Style section, where he writes features and essays on just about anything, be it Scooby-Doo or Chandra Levy; sacred Mormon underwear or the Brawny paper towel man; "Trading Spaces" or the history of urology. He joined the Post in 1999. He has also worked for the Austin American-Statesman and the Albuquerque Tribune.