A first-class post in the Daily Kos by ordinary expat explains how neocons, Christian fundamentalists and proto-fascists have written our nation's current story to their advantage and to our extreme prejudice.

Our story tells us who we are as a people. It delineates our values. It assigns us a place among the nations of the earth.

It also designates and characterizes our enemies. Whom we call enemies and what we think about the people, groups and nations that we call enemies is part of our story and it defines us just as much as what we call ourselves. It may be even more accurate, since the enemy is as much projection of our own unacknowledged dark side as it is an objective description of the actual enemy.

It's always been the philosophy of the JP that when intelligent people seem to be doing everything wrong and failing egregiously in what they are supposed to be doing, you are probably judging their behavior by the wrong scoring system. Ordinary expat contends that Iraq (and now Iran) are just so much meat thrown to the ignorant masses to distract from their real objective.

We have made it clear that most of us can be entertained forever by a cartoon reality that reduces the real complexity of life to the level of the Simpsons, --or Rush Limbaugh. We’re the market, folks. BCR Inc. just supplies the product.

It worked for a long time- it kept us occupied, and, with well-chosen archetypes as key parts of the story, it provided apparent justification for a raft of moves that consolidated executive power to an unprecedented degree. Now it is failing as a story. Now resistance to further power accumulation is growing. They need a new story. That will be Iran.

The only remedy to this state of affairs is to stop allowing BCR, Inc. (Bush, Cheney and Rove — convenient symbols for the fascist kleptocracy that is in control of the executive branch) to write our story for us. We can do this only by writing our own story, a story based on reality. This is all the more important since members of the power elite (BCR, Inc.) eventually come to believe the story they originally foisted upon us, a story divorced from reality.

Isolated and unable to think out of the box- in a real systems fashion- the theocon and the cynical pol share the huge blind spot of coming to think their own fabricated stories ARE reality, instead of sucker bait. Fortunately for us, there is a wider world, a world where, after enough public catastrophe and elite contempt, Mussolini ends up strung up on a lamppost. A wider world view that makes a fair try at including the complexities of human society works better. It is still very flawed, but the secular, early systems thinking that brought us the US Constitution, quantum theory and the French health care system worked. We need to stop wasting time chewing on the bait BCR inc. throws us.

Read the article and ponder.