Paul Thomas: After 20 years out of it, a large dose of deja vu

A Kansas woman who was the victim of a hit-and-run accident has regained consciousness after 20 years in a coma.

Presumably this would be like surfacing from a particularly heavy sleep expecting things to be pretty much as they were when the lights went out. Well, wake up, girl: it's 2005 and it's a different world out there.

Or is it? The concept of future shock - society struggling to cope with and adjust to constant, dramatic change - has been around since Alvin Toffler's book of the same name came out in 1970.

In that time built-in obsolescence seems to have advanced to the point where hi-tech gadgetry is out of date before it leaves the warehouse.

On the other hand, contemporary history - social and political - often seems like a carousel whirling the same old faces in and out of our consciousness at regular intervals.

Rod Stewart has just been and gone like a Tartan Pimpernel. Meanwhile in Jacksonville, Florida, Paul McCartney provided the halftime entertainment at the Superbowl and in London the original supergroup Cream has announced a reunion.

Stewart's breakthrough album was 1971's Every Picture Tells A Story. Soon after he moved to Los Angeles and began his relentless pursuit of leggy, blonde underwear models which continues to this day. In a harmless but nonetheless dispiriting manifestation of the cultural cringe, New Zealanders developed a soft spot for Stewart because one of the underwear models who melted before his potent blend of rock stardom, big hair and very tight trousers was our own Rachel Hunter.

McCartney was every mother's favourite Beatle because of his choirboy looks and genius for sentimental melody. On what became known as The White Album, John Lennon's Happiness Is a Warm Gun sits uneasily alongside McCartney's excruciating exercise in shopping mall reggae, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

Janet Jackson's peekaboob wardrobe malfunction was always going to be a hard act to follow but like the trouper he is, the puckish sexagenarian gave it his best shot. He gave them Hey Jude.

That number was released in 1968, the year Cream ended its short, turbulent but hugely influential existence with a farewell concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, the venue for four comeback concerts this May. 

The year, too, that saw the release of Martin Scorsese's first film. Who's That Knocking at My Door? doesn't have quite the same ring as Raging Bull, Goodfellas or Gangs of New York and I've yet to meet anyone who's seen it but we all had to start somewhere. Almost 40 years on, Scorsese's new film The Aviator has been nominated for 11 Academy Awards.

His stiffest competition is expected to come from the even more venerable Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. Who would have thought that the 1960s TV cowboy of the original spaghetti westerns would go on to become one of the towering figures in American cinema? Probably only Clint.

And who would have thought that 12 years after he last played international cricket - and with the small matter of 60 tests for the All Blacks in the interim - Jeff Wilson would be back in the Black Caps? Probably only Wilson.

Speaking of history repeating itself, the buzz in French political circles is that President Jacques Chirac is seriously contemplating seeking a third seven-year term.

(Americans, who don't like monarchs of any kind, even elected ones, limit their presidents to eight years in the White House.)

A French newspaper has pointed out that if Chirac does run again, there'll be 50-year-olds who have never voted in a presidential election in which he wasn't a candidate.

As they say in France, plus ca change, plus la meme chose - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Cue live cross to the Middle East. A new American Secretary of State has just visited the region attempting to kick-start the peace process, whatever that may be, and urging the European nations to set aside their differences with the US and support its latest half-baked, self-serving initiative. This charade has been a fixture on the diplomatic calendar since the early 1970s.

Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has hailed a new era in the region. The next day in Beirut former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated, raising fears that Lebanon could slide back into the horror and chaos of the 15-year civil war which ended in 1992. One cause of the civil war was the destabilising presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from Jordan in the wake of King Hussein's Black September crackdown.

To complete the circle, the man Abbas shook hands with amid this talk of a new era was Israeli Prime minister Ariel Sharon, the same Ariel Sharon who as Minister of Defence oversaw Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon which greatly exacerbated the horror and chaos and pretty much laid waste to Beirut and its claim to being the Paris of the Middle East.

And so it goes.

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington author.