Can you hear ol' Georgey O sniggering?

Imagine, just for a second, that you fell into a coma about five years ago. The last thing you remember is leaving your comfortable, $700 a month apartment (in a nice, family owned, rent stabilized building only two stops into Brooklyn on the L) to head off to your mid-level job in the city where you make a decent, livable wage, have great health benefits, and stellar job security. Bill Clinton is president, and despite the hubbub about whether or not he'd been getting his freak on in the Oval Office, you remember feeling secure that Democrats would triumph in the 2000 elections. (How could they lose? Booming economy, peace time, low unemployment, I mean an election would have to be fixed for the Republicans to win, right?) Then a noise, like a calliope being swallowed by quicksand, the letters M-I-S-T-E-R S-O-F... and then black.

Fast forward to this morning. Your eyes open for the first time, and as the hospital room slowly comes into focus you are greeted by the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger and wife amid a shower of confetti and balloons on the TV. Bold-type campaign slogans bob up and down in the audience while Arnold gives what appears to be an acceptance speech. "He must be making a movie about running for office" you think. "What stupid casting" you think. "The Terminator...a politician? Who'd buy that?" you think.

You try to guess the plot of the film. You decide it's a future movie. Near future. Post-Apocalyptic, no, the classic Orwellian tale, but with a fresh twist. Where a network of the country's most wealthy families form a secret alliance, you call them The Alliance, and in doing so, gain control of all the money and resources of the world. They quietly place one of their own into the presidency, like a former president Bush type, and in a stroke of nepotistic brilliance, install a unimpeachable defacto monarchy by assuring Alliance members and their heirs will 'inherit' the office in perpetuity. A totalitarian regime emerges, where the constant fear of war, poverty, and illness are used as weapons against the masses to distract them from their quickly diminishing civil and human rights. The middle class is obliterated. People who were once supporting their families begin to struggle, and then starve, and when they look to their government for reasons why so many jobs have evaporated, the Alliance comes up with a diabolical plan to blame the country's most defenseless and mutable, like the elderly, no, illegal immigrants. Sadly, a two-dollar-an-hour berry-picking job is worth coveting and fighting for at this point, so they are blamed. The people are distracted for awhile. When they begin to ask questions again The Alliance triples the broadcast of reality shows, more wars are waged, and advertising campaigns quadruple using images and music from a more prosperous past, evoking the idea that freedom still exists, that one's poverty is a choice. It works. The Alliance is then a mere stroke away from total control of the world. All that is left is replacing the last remaining vestiges of the former governing body with figureheads, powerful only in their ability to assuage the masses, but in fact puppets of the new regime -- they would hire actors to run against the incumbents, and afterward, turn Hollywood into the mother of all dog-wagging machines in charge of every ounce of public information (and in doing so be able to control and hide the identity of the Alliance forever). The film reaches it's crescendo with the first of these elections. The people, still in possession of their fate and able reverse the evil plan that has been set forth by the Alliance, are given a choice between several qualified leaders (who would fight Alliance takeover), and an Alliance-appointed actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, played by himself.

You decide that the scene you woke up to, the ticker-tape and acceptance speech, would be the shocker ending: The people CHOSE their fate. You think that wouldn't be such a bad movie after all, even if it is a little far fetched.