Dunderheads, Mrs. Figg, and the Hearing (was Chaper 8)

[Sea Change]

No: HPFGUIDX 88371

Diana L. wrote: [much snippage by Sea Change]

I think your assessment of Fudge and Percy as "Blundering
Dunderheads" is quite accurate. And I just love the name you came
up with! LOL I also don't think Fudge is ESE or that Percy is a
secret spy for Dumbledore. Sometimes basically good characters do
dumb things that end up helping the villian and, IMHO, this is the
case with Fudge and Percy.

-----

Sea Change responds:

What's being missed IMO in most of this thread and its ancestors is
that getting 50 free-willed humans, each of which is important enough
to belong on any deliberating body, to actually meet for a special
session is like herding cats.  Perhaps it seems this way to me because
I am foolish enough in RL to have belonged to several volunteer
non-profit boards.  In my experience it is a difficult undertaking,
and never happens in an information vaccuum. Dumbledore couldn't have
been surprised by this meeting.

Even then I supposed that the Wizengamot was a much bigger body, only
that Fudge had got himself a specially selected quorum for the legal
procedure at hand.  Convening the Congress of the United States to
impeach Clinton for a little nookie is HUGE news, so if it's the
entirety of the Wizengamot, and for someone so famous (or notorious)
as Harry Potter, and noone knew about it, I'd be absolutely stunned. 
The whole of the UK has 630+ mundane Members of Parliament, even
though it's just the size of California.  I expect similarly lots of
people representing smallish areas in the Wizengamot. 

(Now Sea Change goes lightly off to the side to the Mrs. Figg branch
of this thread). Given the apparently hand-picked nature of this
particular jury, it seems likely Fudge may very well have picked
people who wouldn't particularly know whether or not a Squib could see
a Dementor.  It is his downfall that Madam Bones knows that one
doesn't need to particularly see one, to know one is there.  I wonder
where the all the requisite chocolate was in this book? 

(back on topic)

You can make a blunder to choose to do this, but you can't be a
Dunderhead, because no-one would heed you!


Sea Change