RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Waking Up. “Perhaps the most subversive political movie of the 2010s was Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception.’ It is ostensibly about dreams, but the purpose of manipulating dreams is to bend time, which subjectively passes differently for those dreaming at different levels. Political illusion is like that also. It’s about bending time to seize power, which is very real. In politics the great moments seem always just around the corner, a vote away, instead of being decades of hard work distant.”

“Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today,” the wise man once wrote.