When we watched “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” we enjoyed the electricity of illicit subversion, as Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional Borat led us on a punk’d road trip through Middle America.

Maybe it was the “Voldemort Votes Republican” bumper sticker I saw a few months ago. But as I watched the familiar cavalcade of wizards, Muggles and otherworldly beings in the enjoyably gothic and cloak-and-daggerish “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” I couldn’t help noticing an amusing political allegory.

After all, what’s the difference between modern politics and the dark arts that consume the aspiring magicians in “Harry Potter”?

Imagine, if you will, a post-apocalyptic earth. Thousands of years in the future. All that remains is a burned, charred wasteland.

A spaceship lands on the desert planet. A contingent of aliens spills out, most of them resembling the dreadlocked being with the bulging codpiece that John Travolta played in “Battlefield Earth.”

Searching for an intelligent planet rumored to be in this corner of the galaxy, they sift through the debris. After hours of this, they find an item that’s still intact.

A British mockumentary that takes satirical measure of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Great Britain uncovers something culturally more striking than the movie itself: The Brits are still stuck on L’Affaire Lap Dog. 

By that I mean Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lockstep support of George W. Bush before and throughout the war in Iraq.

On behalf of my gender, I just want to say, sorry about the whole penis thing -- the way it’s been the centerpiece of our attention since, you know, time began.
We’re working on it.

Long ago, it was called phallic worship. It was a religious thing. At least, that’s what the high priests told us in every ancient civilization from Ancient Greece to Japan. But now that we live in a highly secular and cynical era, in which we couch everything mythical, truthful and sincere in self-referential, knowing and quippy code, well, things have changed.