By narrative here I imply a rhetorical tool meant to frame the issues in Greece in such a way as to exclude certain kinds of questions and objections and invite only particular others. Though it is true that in one sense every depiction of events, especially of a procession of events, is a narrative of one form or another,what we have here is a narrative that does not even try to include the relevant facts, but rather to make them opaque, to misrepresent and deny coherently, and by plan.

This is an old technique, as old, at least, as the response by wealthy US elites to the threat to their interests posed by Henry George and his proposed single tax on the unimproved value of land in the late 19th Century, as described in Mason Gaffney's "Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George, That elite, including J.P. Morgan, (Columbia), John D. Rockefeller, (University of Chicago, Leland Stanford, (Stanford), Ezra Cornell, (Cornell), and Johns Hopkins, (Johns Hopkins), responded by hiring professors for the new academic discipline of economics. These economists consciously recast the discipline so as to deprive George and the like minded of the ability to effectively quote the classical economists in criticism of the activities of the Gilded Age tycoons. Their choices of a foundation and method crippled the discipline, but the primary purpose of the discipline was as a PR facade for the wealthy and loss of analytic and predictive power was just a price to be paid.

The more importance an area or issue holds the greater the lengths to which elites will go to maintain their power and influence. I believe that the sad history of the origin of Neo-Classical Economics is paradigmatic of this process, a political variation of which we see unfolding in Europe, with Greece as the epicenter.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."