Michael Slackman of The New York Times is one of those wonderful journalists with an unerring eye for the significant detail. Or for the significant quote from a not especially significant bystander. In a dispatch Friday from Beirut, where Hezbollah had massed as many as 800,000 people to threaten the government of Fouad Siniora, Slackman describes the admixture of motives that animate well, yes, this festive mob. There were certainly pious people at Nasrallah's jamboree. There were also plain fanatics hoping for destruction of something, Syrian agents, Iranian agents, Shia of the Hezbollah and Amal stripe, Christians allied with the turncoat General Aoun, even--I suppose--agents of the Mossad. Lebanon has not really known stable government for decades. Chaos is the Lebanese state of nature. And 27-year-old Hussein Hanoum, up to the big city from the Beka Valley in the South, expressed his gratifications and aspirations: "We are having fun, yes. We have no work. We have nothing else to do, so we came to overthrow the government." This is not a democracy or a republic. It is either run by an elite or by the herd. If you missed my previous Spines about Lebanon, look here, here, here, and here.