He’s the mystical love child of an affair between British beginnings and American producers with entirely too much money on their hands, and we can’t get enough of him.

I like Harry Potter; you like Harry Potter; everyone from your uncle to the strange man on the corner who spouts Bible verses at you every morning likes Harry Potter. If you dislike Harry Potter, then you’re an emotionally stunted freak whose parents didn’t hug you enough as a child. Or you’re Catholic, in which case I’m so sorry for not bring up the distinct possibility that all the forces of Satan are manifesting themselves in a children’s book series.

Anyway, people all over the world scream for Harry Potter (and since "Equus" debuted, some of the teenage girls are screaming for slightly different reasons than everyone else).

But why?

America in general hates reading. I don’t want a platoon of librarians picketing my doorstep the morning after this is published; it’s true. You all know it’s true. Not just for America, but for basically every country where 9 out of 10 households have a television. Face it _ TV is the "Modern World" embodied. It’s fast, cheap, easy and entertaining; it’s like Lindsay Lohan on crack. Well, that’s redundant; it’s like Lindsay Lohan.

As an industrialized nation, we are dedicated to the task of making everything take zero effort. We have lights that turn on and off by themselves, we have automatic car-washers and dishwashers and dog-washers and washers for things that start with the letter Q. We have those little vacuum cleaners that scoot around the floor by themselves and watch you in your bed at night when you’re alone.

Why would anyone take the trouble to scan their eyes over a piece of typed paper and comprehend the words on it when we can spend 20 minutes fighting with the 50-button TV remote to play it out for us in pretty pictures?

The modern attitude toward reading has some authors and publishers reaching for the panic button, yet the Harry Potter publishing crew can afford to kick back over martinis and throw scraps of publicity into the cages of unknown novelists to make them dance.

The boy wizard has defied gravity by growing in proportions only before observed on the ears of our current president. How did one author entrance a society where reading is for nerds and druggies who like to watch the letters climb off the page and tap dance? Magic? Fear tactics? Men wearing dresses?

No, no, and maybe. The real bait that Harry Potter used to hook us all was nothing but a good story.

Ever since television rolled around, we’ve forgotten what makes a good story. The scripts for movies aren’t designed around plot or character development; they’re designed around cowboy-style male heroes and damsels in distress whose lack of characterization is eclipsed only by their lack of cleavage coverage. Television is an aesthetic; who needs an exciting plot line when you can watch 12 Johnny Depps in eyeliner and dreadlocks slicing one another’s heads off? Throw bikinis on a few of them and that would be ideal television right there.

J.K. Rowling couldn’t rely on Daniel Radcliffe to make the series for her when she started writing "The Sorcerer’s Stone." She had to resort to outdated motifs; her characters had to be 3D. Her story lines had to be simple enough to appeal to the masses while taking enough twists to throw the critics off her trail. Her scenery had to avoid upsetting the palettes of people who can’t stand alternate-universe fantasy and boring her readers into early graves with mundane urban high school settings. Her hero had to be a heartbreaker without having six-pack abs and a pretty face to fall back on.

These standards seem to fit the profile of every third-grade classroom’s library, but there is a difference. Unlike almost every other child writer, J.K. Rowling took the simple skeleton that would appeal to children and told it in a grown-up way. Imagine making a cheeseburger with Kobe beef filets and Camembert. The reason that Harry Potter rose through the ranks is that she didn’t just do the story; she did the story well.

Nine out of 10 writers don’t have any idea how to write; look at me. They jazz up their novels with roller coaster plot lines, characters angsting for chapters on end, steamy sex scenes when the novel itself starts to fall apart. The key thing, the crucial thing that almost every author loses sight of, is that other people will hopefully read their novels. Authors can’t write for themselves alone; they have to write so the readers will fall in love. J.K. Rowling understood that. She didn’t confuse us; she didn’t try to trick us. She took an orphan, gave him a magic wand, and sent him off to save the world.

Little by little, she wove side roads and sequins into the Harry Potter universe, but its core is the image of an orphan who’s whisked away to the magical realm that we all have locked away in the corners of our minds. What makes Harry Potter so much better than all the child-goes-to-magical-world debris scattered around the fictional world is its humility. Harry Potter is a humble series; its humor is gentle and constant, its angst subtle. Readers aren’t turned off by a precocious, perfect brat in the center spotlight; he’s just Harry. He’s just Harry Potter.

There is no trick to learning how to write like Rowling and the other greats of literature, because you can’t. There is no magic potion; all the degrees and writing classes in the world can’t help you if you haven’t got "it" _ the literature universe’s version of "star quality." Maybe there is a higher power sticking our purpose labels onto us before we’re born; maybe destiny exists. More than anything else, even more than her grasp of the art, Rowling’s success comes from lighting a lantern in a sour, disheartened world. The idea that a middle-aged woman from the middle of nowhere can sit down at a café and write one of the world’s most renowned novels lights a fire under us; it coaxes us to believe in purpose, just when we thought that life had none.

Maybe there is magic, if we dare to look for it. Maybe there’s nothing but the endless waiting, for no purpose at all. The truth doesn’t matter; for decades to come, 11-year-olds all over the world will be peering out the windows into the stars, waiting for that magical letter from Hogwarts to come take them home.

Jessie Matus will be a junior at Oneonta High School this fall..