We tell ourselves stories...

   After many years and miles, Joan Didion's description of a journalist's reson d'etat remains the best I've found.
   We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
    The man with the candy  will lead the children into the sea.
    The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is about to commit a mortal in, or is about to register a political protest, or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens.
     We look for  the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.
     We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
     We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
                                  From "The White Album"         
     And which also - for me - is the How and Why George W. Bush invaded Iraq in response to the tragic phantasmagoria of 9-11.