Barack To The Future

Beating the summer heat some time back, I watched a National Geographic series on the 80s.  There was some good commentary and some bad.  Some of the commentators were not historians or close observers of the facts, but just pop culture twinkies (or should I say ding dongs) who were pretty random.  One knot head said that the meaning of the entire decade was Back To The Future, that all people wanted was to return to the 1950s and little of significance happened, it was a terrible time, etc.  As he ranted, I could tell he was a lib who merely hated the politics of Reagan/Bush.  At first I just rolled my eyes and forgot him.  But later, I realized that this is indeed how some pop culture idiot sees the world—movies are real and reality is not. They just try to tell explain reality metaphorically as a movie.

Heck I could turn the tables on them with a movie of my own.  Let’s call it Barack To The Future.  It would begin with a young handsome Muslim guy named Hussein Obama living in the 7^th century who gets swept up in jihad. He comes from a background of Arab slave traders but he happens to be ¼ African because his grandfather hit up on a slave woman who was Kenyan.  Obama is not a fighter.  Being bright and a smooth talker, he manages to hook up a nice cushy job in Andalusia, where he quickly loses his Islamic fervor and becomes a Nothing, but swears he will always stand with the Muslims. 

Hussein has a mad scientist side-kick in the movie named Hawkins who is also jaded by religion, but who invents a time machine and transports Hussein forward after he gets in a scrape with alcohol. (He accused a local police chief of racism and then offered to smooth matters over with a Beer Summit, which did not go over well with the Imam.)  So quickly Hussein is forwarded in time to become Charles IV of France, the playboy king that everybody agreed had great potential but he refused to lead, or at least led from behind and drowned his country in debt.  So, covering the departure as a jousting accident, Hawkins sends Obama forward again, trying to find him an era fitting his style.  He assumes the title of James II of England in the 1680s. James gets run out of the kingdom because he wants to nullify everything Parliament passes with an executive order.  With the peasants pounding at the castle door, James flees and Hawkins has to send Hussein to a new time.

Obama then is transported to Italy.  He likes to write, Hawkins has discovered—the kind of guy who would write two autboiographies before he had even become a public figure.  And he’s narcissist.  Thus Benito, his new name, founds the fascist movement as an socialist alternative to communism.  Hawkins coaches him along with careful development and Hussein gets to try his hand at writing policy.  Thus Benito Mussolini pens the National Socialist platform that has national pensions, national health care, national ownership of auto companies (because if you got their money, their health, and their transportation, you got ‘em controlled.), gun control, and government control or ownership of the key industries like banking.  In a truly clever plank, Benito crafts total separation of church and state.  There shall be no politics spoken within a church building and no faith to be spoken outside the building.  So the outside becomes completely secular and Christians, such as the powerful Catholic Church are silenced effectively.  Alas, Benito, the crappy warrior, gets himself involved with a fellow National Socialist in Germany who wants to take over the world.  Everyone else allies against them and in the end, Hawkins narrowly rescues Hussein-Benito making use of a floating skateboard, while a Mussolini lookalike gets shot and hung from a lamp post instead.  It is a close call. Hawkins has to send him forward once again. 

And thus Obama lands in Hawaii as a lad with a rather confusing birth certificate and upbringing shrouded in secrecy.  This time Hawkins wants Hussein to develop more slowly in politics.  Benito was almost successful, but Obama is capable of a better act.  Teleprompters, community organizing, and oratories later, Hussein is President of the United States.  In fact the story is rather a repeat of his past performances.  He has discovered golf and basketball rather than bull fighting and jousting.  He doubles the national debt, but the country survives because it is a strong economy.  He trashes the reputation of America with every ally and foe.  He tries to dictate with executive orders but Congress is full of wussies who won’t impeach him and don’t know how to check his actions. He balkanizes the races, brings in millions of illegal citizens-to-be, and fiddles like Nero while the Middle East and Ukraine burn.  (I know, I know.  This is probably a too unbelievable screen play for thinking audiences.) Eventually, after two terms Obama has finally termed out.  With a new President arriving on inauguration day, He slips out the door into a limo which levitates a few inches above the pavement.  A man on the street is heard to say, “Thank gosh he’s gone forever now.”  But the guy next to him says, “I wouldn’t count on it.  Seems like we have seen this before.”
  And then a big "To Be Continued" flashes over the screen.