KEY POINTS:
It's more than just a flashback - this is history repeating itself. The seventies are back. The signs are everywhere. The must-see movie of the moment is Mamma Mia.
For almost 30 years being an Abba fan has been a Mark of Cain, a one-way ticket to
Pariahville, but suddenly grown men and women are openly humming Abba's sickly concoctions and forcing this musical bubblegum down their children's throats.
This week the Bank of England's deputy governor declared that the current economic turmoil is as bad as the 1970s when oil price hikes precipitated stagflation - zero growth, rising prices, escalating job losses. Sound familiar?
The threat of terrorism was as pervasive then as now. The murder of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian group Black September at the 1974 Munich Olympics was a precursor to 9/11 in the sense of being a terrorist tour de force on Western soil with far-reaching consequences.
Many countries faced domestic terror threats from organisations like the Red Army Faction in West Germany and the Weather Underground in the USA.
Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, now a professor of education, is back in the news because of his links to Barack Obama.
Ayers served with Obama on the board of a Chicago philanthropic foundation and donated a few hundred dollars to an earlier election campaign.
Obama's detractors have joined the dots, connecting his acquaintance with Ayers, his exotic background, his preference for rocket over common or garden lettuce, his habit of exchanging fist bumps (aka terrorist fist jabs) with his wife and his hopelessness at ten-pin bowling to flesh out a portrait of a man who's too unAmerican, too different to be president.
Fortunately for Obama they haven't yet noticed the colour of his skin.
Incidentally Richard Nixon, who foreshadowed George W. Bush by winning re-election in 1972 despite America haemorrhaging blood, treasure and prestige in an unpopular war, was so keen on ten-pin bowling that he had a bowling alley installed in the White House.
After a spell in hibernation, the Russian bear is back and itching to kick-start Cold War Two.
The cause in which it monstered Georgia - South Ossetian independence - seems as convoluted as the Schleswig-Holstein Question which inflamed Europe in the mid-19th century and which, according to British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, only three people had ever understood: "One's dead," he said, "one went mad and I've forgotten."
Despite the complexity, many pundits were able to cut to the heart of the matter which is that Russia is blameless and it's all the West's, particularly America's, fault.
This too has an echo of the seventies when no matter how brutishly the Soviet Union behaved, it would be excused by some as a self-defensive reaction to the provocations of the West. Of course it's hypocritical, not to say comical, for the current US administration to complain that in the 21st century you can't just go around invading other countries.
It's equally hypocritical for Russia to champion South Ossetian independence, having practically bombed Chechnya back into the Stone Age for trying to break away from the Russian Federation.
And quite why American hypocrisy makes it okay for Russia to in effect annex chunks of a neighbouring country is anyone's guess.
The seventies saw women flexing their political muscle. On the face of it feminism achieved a major breakthrough in 1979 with Margaret Thatcher becoming Britain's first woman prime minister.
Unfortunately the Iron Lady, being a flint-hearted economic rationalist with a ravenous appetite for conflict, was more macho than most male politicians, as she frequently pointed out.
By going to war on behalf of a handful of sheep-shaggers on a wind-swept rock in the South Atlantic, Thatcher not only revived the myth of the British bulldog, she also demolished the theory that if women ran the world, there'd be no more wars.
There's clearly some truth in the adage that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
American women are now planning to punish their compatriots - and the rest of us - for conspiring to deny Hillary Clinton her birthright by voting for John McCain.
Never mind that McCain is Bush with silver hair and a vile temper, an old white male who's so rich he can't remember how many houses he owns and wants US troops to stay in Iraq for 100 years.
It promises to be the greatest dummy spit of all time, a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face on an epic scale.
This must be what Karl Marx had in mind when he wrote that history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
