Each time the pictures show the same thing. Blown tires. Shattered windows. Bloodied seats. Charred skeletons of steel. The mug shots are pulled out of family albums, and the faces are familiar as types, if not known as acquaintances.

At first the reports are conflicting, but the facts aren't as important as the urgency of pre-conceived emotions.

Later, at the funerals, the weather is always appropriate. It's either a perfect spring day to cry over, or a thunder and lightning afternoon of vengeance, with the horizon dimmed by clouds and the rain blinding the eyes. In mid-summer, these funerals are always on hamsin days, full of static electricity.

They are always announced with national invitations, every hour on the hour the radio names the point of departure, and the final destination.

Like bus routes dispersed around the country with the near-perfect randomness of any public opinion poll, these funerals are for the needy, those who require martyrs to explain themselves, subsidized with the rhetoric of politicians earning a profitable interest off the martyrs they can claim to be added to their accounts.

Look how quickly life returns to normal, someone says, it's proof of vitality. Yes, life must go on, agendas have to be drawn up, priorities set. It's what the dead would want.

The victims faces peer fuzzily out of newspages. Here's a woman now dead who was once laughing at a party. A darkroom technician cropped away her friends so that it's just her in the picture. Her laughter is now full of an irony she knew nothing about at the time. The irony is how she ended up an excuse for someone's cause, an item on a disputed agenda. One day, someone will make a list of all the buses. The longer the memory, the longer the list, and there's no shortage here of people with long memories.

Maybe someone without the personal memory but with an academic curiosity will one day be able to do a doctoral thesis on the correlation between a charred bus and the peace process.

Statistics could be calculated, graphs matrixed.

The Coastal Road bus turned into the Litani Operation. The Jericho bus turned into the second national unity government. The Ismailia bus turned into the Likud convention. Each bus had its own destination, as fateful and inevitable as any Greek tragedy, arriving according to a timetable set by history.

The buses could be depicted as a long caravan of correlation between casualties of stupidity and hubris in which the victims were the most foolish of all because they never had the chance to realize that they were being used.

Already, some people look at this list and see proof of one thing. Others see proof of another. The hysterical, of which there's no shortage in this part of the world, demand revenge or claim credit. The thoughtful can only utter the banalities of any condolence call. The superstitious believe whatever they are told, the sophisticated find nuance in the spray of bullets.

And as always, the public opinion polls show that we are divided, against the world and against ourselves, comforted only by the certainty that we have been singled out.