My breakfast was enlivened by a couple of reporters, writing from Beirut, in a recent _Washington Post National Weekly_. Discussing the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, they say:

"...across the region, political reformers are benefiting from the unifying forces of technology and mass media. Digital channels outside the control of states are carrying anything from a Kuwaiti woman's call for voting rights in her country to a Lebanese Christian's demands to drive Syrian troops out from his. The foot soldiers are Islamic political activists in some cases, Bob Dylan disciples, communists or Arab secular nationalists in others...."

Somebody please clue me in. I had always supposed that Bob Dylan was in show business & that such people had fans, not "disciples". I am not about to be either. But if there are really demonstrators in Kuwait & Lebanon who are parading around with portraits of a scruffy Jew from Minnesota instead of those bloody characters we are so used to seeing in the papers, then I want a picture of them, to which (obSongs) I will be happy to affix the caption "God Bless America".

--- Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||: Yanks think 200 years is a long time, and Brits think 200 miles is a long way. :||