A few months ago the Presidential election seemed a self-contained narrative, an uncomplicated drama starring Barack and Hillary, and then Barack and John. Democrats feared that if their candidate threatened to win, the Republicans would pull an “October surprise,” and speculation centered on the bombing of Iran. But since then, time has accelerated, and the Presidential campaign no longer occupies the exact center of the story— it’s caught in the vortex, like a house picked in by a wind storm, as if pre-election surprises are no longer what humans perpetrate but rather what the elements perpetrate upon them. Appropriately, it was a hurricane, Gustav, that announced the shift, forcing the heretofore unimaginable cancellation of a day of Republican conventioneering. With Sarah Palin’s selection, the Republicans produced a briefly compelling storm of their own, as if desperate to reassert human primacy over nature, but Ike (and Palin’s thudding earth-boundedness) punctured that conceit, and the nation’s financial debacle has blown away its remnants. For the last half-century the American fantasy has been that we produce the planet’s currents, but the truth, now forcefully reasserting itself, is that the human condition is to ride them. Hang on.