By M.G. Wood

Rejoice Americans! Your long national nightmare of having to live in the present, to live in a state of conscious awareness of current events and the state of national and international affairs including the democratic elections in these United States will at long last come to an end on Tuesday January 15th. After suffering weeks of a writer’s strike that has taken from it’s people the sitcoms and medical dramas that can relieve the pain and suffering caused by the on-set of awareness, American Idol will return to the airwaves and once again Americans can stop reading the newspapers and conversing with friends, neighbors, and family. Most importantly, Americans will once again have the god-given (or Murdoch-given) right to vote in an election that they really care about. No more deciding between which Republican is meanest or whether to go Back to the Future with Clinton or to escape Out of the Past with Obama.

American Idol premiered in the United States in the summer of 2002, a few scant months after 9/11 and a fewer scant months before the invasion of Iraq. Woe was we of American suffering that so longed for an escape from the sadness and despair engulfing our lives that we could be delivered by a good old-fashioned Talent Show. We Americans bathed in the embryonic fluids of “Reality TV” while our dear leaders planned and executed the War on Terror, giving bloody birth to a preemptive war that continues to grow taller and more mature every day.

But, if there is anything that may linger in the hearts and minds of Americans after the warm, golden glow of escapism once again encapsulates them into a foaming, soapy pod, it may be Escapism’s equally intoxicating cousin Nostalgia. For after the hazy smoke of reality (real “reality”) has settled and cleared, there will remain the echoing sounds of talking heads and pundits and political junkies wailing along the wonder-wall of America; occasionally reminding us that there still exists a life outside the iPod; and outside this Pod is a chorus of political voices chanting, “Remember When”: The Bridge to the 21st Century, Morning in America, A Thousand Points of Light, Keep Hope Alive, or as the single greatest campaign slogan of all-time: Alice Cooper proclaimed, “A Troubled Man for Troubled Times”.

George: What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams... FOR WHAT? So you can swim and dance and play.

-THE TIME MACHINE (1960)

Don't worry darlin'/Now baby don't you fret/We're livin' in the future and/None of this has happened yet.

-LIVIN’ IN THE FUTURE Bruce Springsteen

Dr. Emmett Brown: If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit.

-BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be released this Summer, and as one who can claim the original Indiana Jones film The Raiders of the Lost Ark as a seminal moment in a film-going life, I am absolutely giddy. And as anyone who waited in line for hours to be the first to see The Phantom Menace will tell you, even this can be driven by an unrealistic Nostalgia, a nostalgia not necessarily for a particular time and place, but for an experience.

I for one will be a misty-eyed patron sitting along the aisle anxiously awaiting John Williams’ rousing score to stir the soul and awaken the imagination in a darkened theatre near me this summer. By then the Presidential Primaries will have run their course and we will be anticipating the National Election to come in the Fall of the year. As the curtain spreads open before us, the Paramount Pictures mountain will surely dissolve into a fantastic landscape, and we will escape, having safely navigated the treacherous terrain of reality to get here, to this place, and this time; to a new adventure wholly different from anything that’s come before.

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