Terry Gilliam's 1985 black comedy Brazil is set at "8:49 p.m., somewhere in the 20th century." Brazil is full of the trappings of a culture that never exactly existed but is still familiar, a ravaged, blackened environment, packed with clunky typewriter/computer consoles, strange cars, and the neon-lit streets of a futuristic film noir. This is a decidedly British dystopia, its citizens the unassuming, go along to get along sorts Americans frequently think Brits to be. (Gilliam, though American himself, was a member of British comedy troupe Monty Python.)

Brazil opens with a televised conversation between a spokesman of the "Ministry of Information" and a journalist who pitches softball questions and receives answers which are either irrelevant or just plain ignorant. The world of Brazil is beset by horrific acts of terrorism, and the Ministry of Information spokesman understands why: "bad sportsmanship." The spokesman further claims that progress has been made against the terrorists, and delivers a stunner when it's pointed out that attacks have been going on for 13 years: "beginner's luck."

Of course, no one seems to notice this total disconnect or mind the ineptitude.

All that terrorism calls for intrusive security, but the security machines all seem like cobbled-together junk, and their cheap construction and amusing noises don't appear to hinder any acts of terrorism. When the bombings inevitably occur, the general rule is to ignore the blood, fire and bodies. In a restaurant scene, bombing victims stagger helplessly in the background until a screen is put in place so that the other diners can eat in peace. The shocked victims haunt the dreams of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a lower-level bureaucrat who wants a better life.

Undergirding Brazil 's ineffectual war on terrorism is a system that keeps its citizens docile through a combination of Kafka-esque bureaucratic bumbling and a police presence of inhuman efficiency. When citizens act up (or become the victims of hapless bureaucracy), they are removed to detention, where they are systematically tortured. They are, inevitably, never heard from again.

Ron Suskind reported in the New York Times Magazine that in 2002, after he published an article unfriendly to former Bush communications director Karen Hughes in Esquire, he was summoned to a meeting with a senior Bush advisor, who told Suskind he was "in what we call the reality-based community," people "who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Those who, like the Brits of Brazil , have grown incapable of seeing and believing the reality of their president's easily verifiable dishonesty and small-mindedness, those who refuse to see that military action creates more terrorism, that unprecedented national debt is bad, that killing Iraqis harms our security more than gay marriage, have spoken. They are apparently a narrow majority. And so, "reality-based" voters might be tempted to say, they deserve to watch as their personal economic struggles get worse, as their kids enter combat to satisfy a willfully ignorant man's desires.

But there is an unavoidable difficulty with what these voters who are not reality-based have wrought. Terrorists inhabit reality. And though homegrown terrorism has struck elsewhere, members of the reality-based community primarily reside in the population centers that are, apparently, tempting targets to Islamic fundamentalists. Reality-based citizens are more often the ones who travel abroad, who deliberately seek out cultural exchange and consider themselves global citizens. The reality-based are the ones more often in foreign places and therefore in the cross-hairs. The voters who have accepted the fantasy of George W. Bush's simplified world endanger everyone. Perhaps blue voters can be forgiven for being angry about the red votes facilitating forced entry into a world so horribly and precisely like Gilliam's Brazil .

At some points, it's tempting to think Gilliam managed a look 20 years into the future when he made Brazil , though that uncanny effect more likely proves that the methods and results of power abuse are variations on an eternal theme. Now that much of America is content in the notion that our government is always out for the greater good despite overwhelming evidence of deceit and abuse at the highest levels, Brazil deserves a second look. Its relevance has only grown, and it's got the advantage of not being as overused as Orwell.

It also reveals a frightening change in the perception of what it means to be American.

Into Brazil 's world of hapless Brits, overcome by paperwork and constant fear, blasts an American on a zip line, Harry Tuttle. Robert de Niro is an American in the way we've always preferred to see ourselves, a no-nonsense, fearless hero who, rather than endlessly talking and planning, simply and effectively does what he sets out to do. Sam Lowry's air conditioner has gone out in the midst of a terrible heat wave, and the recording at the government's Central Services ("this has not been a recording," it says) is no help. Tuttle is a freelance repairman, complete with balaclava and pistol, who refuses to put up with all the paperwork and hassle. He gets things done, and refuses to sit idly waiting.

Tuttle is the kind of American hero who hopped the ocean to help the French and the British push the Boche back from the trenches of the Western Front, who saddled up once more when the Boche went Nazi. The hand-wringing Europeans, the story always goes, got their world set aright for them, and we Americans retreated back to our split-level ranches and good, clean happiness, safe in the notion of ourselves as hardy, heroic frontiersmen.

Brazil 's protagonist also falls hard for the woman who inhabits his dreams (Jill Layton, played by Kim Greist), a fragile, astonishing beauty, who, when he meets her in reality, turns out to be a truck-driving, self-sufficient and not at all fragile woman. When he lets slip a little of his dreamlife, she kicks him right out of her moving truck with both her combat-booted feet. He is no less smitten when he realizes that she is dangerous, although he is deathly afraid that she might, with all that danger, turn out to be one of the terrorists who are blowing up innocent dinner patrons and shoppers. She too is, of course, American.

The deciding of this election in favor of George W. Bush demolishes the stereotypes that Gilliam played with. Red America, faced with the arrival of a reality-based Harry Tuttle promising to win the day with old-fashioned American fearlessness, has slammed the door in his face. The majority of America has become the docile crowd. Frightened Bush fantasists don't give a damn about what those in the reality-based community think or believe, even when the reality-based are merely reporting reality instead of fantasy; most still believe Saddam was behind Sept. 11. But now their actions directly increase the danger of retaliation upon those who inhabit reality.

It's not safe to expect anyone outside the reality-based community to respond to reality. If the fantasists bother to read these words, they will likely find a label with which to safely dismiss them -- "northeastern liberal elitism" should serve (though I like my grits with cheese and come from a family including truck drivers, nurses, secretaries and cafeteria workers).

The reality-based habit of carefully honing arguments and backing them up with facts might be just as effective if the results were published in Finnish.

If the fantasists somehow trade docility for awareness, there may be hope. Holding one's breath is not recommended. If things remain as they are, it seems likely that another horrific attack will eventually happen. How can it not, when Bush's military aggression is every day furthering the policies that exacerbate terrorism? And if terrorists strike again, the fantasists will call for sinking further into Brazil, for more aggression, fewer civil rights, and unquestioning devotion to George W. Bush. The grim cycle will continue.

The reality-based could take the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach and move to the vastness of red America, embrace Wal-Mart, fundamentalism and Fox News. It seems unlikely. There is always emigration, but there is something deep in most Americans which fights against it. The reality-based are Americans too, after all, just as in love with the fading promise of this country and its former devotion to eyes-wide-open democracy.

How does one inject reason and reality into a fantasy-inspired cycle of violence which always results in an iron Republican grip on power? If they resist Bush's fantasy, will the organizations of the left be gradually and deliberately transformed by the label "extremist" slowly morphing to mean "terrorist?"

Brazil's Lowry, after bucking the bureaucracy and emulating the can-do attitude of Harry Tuttle, finds himself detained, at the mercy of his fearful fellow citizens. He is left no out but a blissful insanity, his own fantasy in which Harry Tuttle's warriors rappel to his rescue.