I’m not sure why there’s been such a fuss about Barack Obama’s recent victory. By my count, he’s the third black president.

Before American voters chose Obama to lead the country, there was President Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) on television’s 24 and President Beck (Morgan Freeman) in the disaster movie Deep Impact.

Sarah Palin isn’t so special either.

Glenn Close served as the first female vice-president more than a decade ago in the action flick Air Force One. Heck, Geena Davis became president by an accident of history on the short-lived series Commander in Chief.

That’s right, folks. Before it happened in the real world, it happened in pop culture.

Artists have been making political history for decades now.

As far as black U.S. presidents go, they have been around since at least 1975, when Parliament elected Muhammad Ali to the highest office in the land by way of the funk song Chocolate City.

This is the power of pop culture: It shows us a world that doesn’t exist, but could. It’s a way of harnessing the human imagination to create an alternative reality. Only a black presidency isn’t science fiction anymore, it’s a fact.

This summer, Haysbert claimed his performance on 24 helped pave the way for Obama.

“If anything, my portrayal of David Palmer, I think, may have helped open the eyes of the American people,” he told the Associated Press in July.

The actor is dead on. Pop culture has the power to be on the leading edge of society, to shape the world as it reflects it.

Just look at the space program. Human beings set foot on the moon long before Neil Armstrong made the trip. A full 67 years in advance of the Apollo 11 mission, a band of French astronomers landed on the lunar surface in the silent film Le Voyage dans la lune.

This landmark motion picture led several decades later to shows such as the original Star Trek, which in turn inspired a whole generation of space explorers.

So the question becomes: Does pop culture make historical change possible? Does an event have to happen on the screen or page before it can be achieved in reality?

I have no clue.

All I know for sure is sometimes pop culture seems downright prophetic.

When I was a kid collecting Marvel comic books, I thoroughly enjoyed reading issue 258 of The Incredible Hulk, in which the rampaging giant travels to the Soviet Union. There he finds the Forbidden Zone, a barren area of desolation polluted by radioactivity.

This was in 1981, a full five years before the accident at Chernobyl. Now the Forbidden Zone is a reality and it’s not so easy to dismiss writers who pen superhero tales as geeks with overactive imaginations.

What can I say? If the election of Barack Obama is any indication, the decades ahead are going to be fascinating. At long last, the future has arrived.