Nothing to Celebrate

One of my favorite -- if obvious -- metrics of the health of civil society in any given place is celebratory gunfire. If locals mark major events like weddings, sporting victories or the start of spring break by shooting off a couple hundred rounds of high-velocity ammunition, it's a sign that at the very least there's something wrong with the police department, if not the social contract.

Partying with firearms is nothing new in Lebanon, and neither are the injuries caused by bullets obeying the laws of gravity. Still, for the most part, citizens of Lebanon express their love of explosives with high-grade Chinese-made fireworks rather than weapons. (It's become fashionable to launch bottle rockets -- at any and all hours -- as a way or marking no a return from pilgrimage to Mecca, much to the chagrin of those living next door to the pious.)

So it's a fairly bad omen that most major speeches by the country's politicians are now accompanied by pre- and post-game firearm fusillades. But it's not just assault rifles and heavy machine guns making the noise anymore. Below is a cell-phone video clip of a member of Amal, a Shia Muslim political party, launching a rocket propelled grenade over a Sunni Muslim neighborhood on the occasion of a broadcast by the head of Amal, Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri. Party henchmen in Sunni neighborhoods do the same thing when one of their nabobs blabber. No one ever gets arrested.

It's stuff like this that has many people worried about another civil war.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut