The Presidential Candidates’ Fairy-Tale Mirror
In the prologue to “The Snow Queen” (the source for Disney’s “Frozen”), Hans Christian Andersen describes “an evil troll”—the devil—who fashioned a mirror with unusual qualities: “It would shrink everything that was good and beautiful to almost nothing and it would magnify whatever was worthless and ugly and make it seem even worse”; its effect on ordinary people was to make “their faces so twisted you couldn’t tell who they were.”