I Love You You're Perfect Now Change

Last night this sort of . . . eccentric but very beautiful boy whom I sleep with from time to time told me the most charming post-coital bedtime story in which all the major figures of the ongoing presidential campaign stood in for fairy-tale characters in a sort of Into-the-Woods style mash-up, or something. I wasn't really paying attention. I bring it up only because the hilarious and ongoing implosion of the McCain/Palin partnership has something of a fairy-tale quality to it, although clearly more along the Grimm Bros. to del Toro continuum than the happy-happy Americo-Disney types.

They do seem to exist in a world in which logic and continuity as we understand them don't universally apply. Barack Obama has run a campaign modeled on Reagan and Bill Clinton: projecting empathy; emitting optimism; evincing assurance. John McCain has gathered an army of mythical creatures and tried to storm the castle from . . . within the castle. Watching a billion-year-old creature who has inhabited the Senate since the solar system was a mere accretion disc twinkling in Yaweh's eye, along with his sometimes partner, the northern sorceress, go galloping in circles, believing themselves to be engaged in a flanking maneuver, is not pretty, but it is very funny. If I were Italo Calvino, I'd make a novel of it. What do you think they say to each other, when perchance they meet?