heat

Well, the shit's really hitting the fan in Lebanon but let's talk about really important things: House Republicans want to make sure the Pledge of Allegiance will be free of pesky Consitutional challenges by making it impossible for Federal Courts to rule on the Pledge's legality.

That doesn't create a dangerous precedent.

Why on this green earth would anybody create a bill of such nonsense? There is no attack on God greater in this country than the blanket oppression of the poor and working class and the unelected president's war in Iraq. Meanwhile, House Republicans want to make sure that Evangelicals know that old God is going to be protected, by them.

Does God need protecting? Does perhaps the child of a single mother growing up in East New York need maybe just a little bit more protecting? How about that 19 year old kid from West Virginia just going back to Iraq for his third tour of duty? Might he need a little bit more of God's help, our help and anybody's help, than the Pledge of Allegiance does?

260 morons in the House ruled that one branch of government should be allowed to put restraints on the Constitutional duties of another branch, it's another proof that this society has passed on from democracy into a nether state of something else. This something else is mostly plutocracy and some weird pseudo-philosophical idea that the free market as it exists in America should be the blueprint for government to follow.

Meanwhile, Lebanon shudders.

Tyre, one of the larger towns in Lebanon, has been hit harshly and that has been particularly painful for me because Tyre has always been one of those magical places for me, a kind of touchstone for my historical imagination. Heroditus visited Tyre and wrote that it had been founded somewhere around 2750 B.C., it's conquerors include Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Marmeluks and finally the Ottomans. Like Palermo, Tyre's beauty, its importance and its perseverence have been proved by the numbers of its conquerors. Alexander transformed the city in his seige of it, after seven months he could not conquer the island that was much of Tyre so he built a causeway to it and finally was able to topple its walls; Tyre's most famous voice perhaps belongs to William of Tyre, who chronicled the Crusades and wrote much on Peter the Hermit. He was also responsible for discovering of Baldwin IV, the boy who would shortly be king of Christendom's Kingdom of Jerusalem, that Baldwin was leperous. William's rises and falls in political and religious fortune hint at the labyrinths of conspiricies and fates that seem to define the city.

The city is now crooked teeth of fallen buildings and burning trucks.

There is a lot of talk of assigning blame and of what to do with the militant Hizbullah, but what is scariest is the steadily eroding support for peace in the populations of Arab states more willing to practice some measure of diplomacy with Israel.

Regardless of what happens, what seems certain is that moderate Arab states like Jordan and Egypt will have lost some needed prestige and Iran will be the happy recipient of the gain. It's hard not to see Iran's hand in all that's happening, and in their actions, they've put pretty much everybody besides Russia in an uncomfortable place.

Bush chews on a buttered roll and talks about Assad and Syria putting pressure on Hisbullah, but as usual he's talking around the real problem. While some have argued that Iran has played a muted role n this crisis, it's not difficult to imagine that Hizbullah needed at least tacit support before kidnapping those two Israeli soldiers, and while the other countries in the Arab world have called to rein in the spectre of violence, Iran has extolled the virtues of fighting against the "Zionists".

So there's the possibility of another intifada as well.

Here the rain has just started, it had been threatning to for hours, even half-starting. The air felt alive with occasional rumblings of thunder and half-hearted flickers of lightning; all afternoon it was dark and the wind would come to sudden life and then a stillness and the sounds of cicadas would be brought to a height and fade, everything rising and falling, the afternoon stretching out like a spilled drink. Now suddenly, the storm has broken from the leash, just before the dawn.

I haven't been able to sleep tonight, a dissatisfaction in my soul of some kind, a restlessness like one of those unassuming Poe characters occasionally got.

I'm off to look at the storm.