To many Americans, the present day is like the nightmarish "alternate 1985" of Back to the Future. We look at the disaster in Iraq and the related struggling American economy and damaged U.S. reputation and feel a lot like Marty did when confronted with his neighborhood transformed into a slum. We ask ourselves, "How could this happen?" The current state of affairs sometimes seems so bad that it feels existentially wrong. The comedian Patton Oswalt puts it like this:
There was this time when, in 2003, I felt like we had all fallen into this really creepy, alternate Earth--like, the "bad" Earth, where Bush won, and the towers fell, and we were going to Iraq, and Paris Hilton was successful, and everything was just wrong--everything was goddamn evil. And I felt like there was like a Earth next to ours where Gore won, and the towers still stood, and we weren't in Iraq, and Paris Hilton had been eaten by wolves, and everything was just wonderful, like...it was all good, you know?
The way we got to this point is complicated, but on one level all our trouble dates to September 11, 2001. The problems that began then were not a direct result of the terrorist attacks, which we could have prevented or at least responded to much more effectively, but the Bush administration's poorly-thought-out reaction to them. In the Back to the Future trilogy, Marty's main weakness is allowing Biff to provoke him by calling him "chicken." Marty consistently lets Biff "project" his insecurity and anger onto him, causing him to "become" his enemy and get into a vengeful, self-destructive pattern--which is just what Biff wants.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened to George Bush on 9/11. Tellingly, Biff is not just a good stand-in for terrorism, but for Bush as well, because, like Marty, Bush played into the hands of the terrorists by letting them successfully project their anger and vengefulness onto him. Bush then became like his enemy, allowing himself to be driven by similar religious and ideological mania and resorting to similar inhumane tactics. Like Biff, Bush let his insecurity drive him to take advantage of an unusual situation by unfairly grabbing far more power and money than he was entitled to and using it for selfish, misguided, disastrous ends.
In Back to the Future II, Marty and Doc travel back to November 12, 1955, steal the almanac back from Biff, and thereby set time back on its "proper course." My hope is that 2008 will be the year that America does the equivalent. We don't need to erase the intervening years since 9/11--and unless Barack Obama is able to ride a De Lorean back to 2001, chase Bush on a hoverboard, steal his executive power, and burn it, we can't--but we can take this opportunity to steer the course of history away from the "wrong turn" more and more Americans think it has taken and back onto its earlier path.
And while we're at it, we should follow Marty's example and learn from our mistakes. In the course of his adventures in time, Marty gains self-esteem by choosing to do the right thing. With this new self-image, he is able to abandon his old threatened, reactive course of action, which had been keeping him stuck on a dead-end course. Instead, he learns to stop, cool down, and think rationally. When he does this, he sees Biff for the essentially empty, surmountable threat that he is, and is able to deal with him accordingly. By doing the same thing, America could create not just a "good" 2008, but an even better 2015.
Let's stay away from 1885, though. Part III sucks.
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