Second, and third. Why not? Arab revolutions, as Al Jazeera anchors took to saying when things first flared up, have become a piece of cake. The drift of which would suggest that we've had at least two since January.

Well, what we've had is the beginning of one - then something else, then protests - and that is all there is to say. Interesting that the Facebook page calling for demonstrations on 23 July is trying to replicate the logic of the initial uprising by protesting military abuses on the anniversary of the military coup that was to institute a supposedly independent Egypt, the way police abuses were protested on Police Day (25 Jan).

Will it work? Maybe. But what on earth would that mean in practise? The fact that the page in question has for its logo a modified version of the Arab nationalist flag that was adopted by the Free Officers and an oversize eagle - symbol not only of state control but of bureaucracy, dictatorship, corruption, ignorance, poverty, defeat, economic and military, yes, military dependency - does not bode well for the third revolution.

And that, in a nutshell, is what I have to say: that, when all is said and done, if the current unrest does not reflect a clear-cut break with the military-dominated ideologies of Arab nationalism (not to mention those of Islamism and messed-up variations on socialism or communism), the martyrs will have died in vain.

One feature of the 20th century to which the Arab world has remained hostage is the idea that there exist a small number of people who know better, whose understanding of human history or the human soul - the Marxist or Freudian correlates being, respectively, dialectical materialism and the unconscious - is scientific as opposed to ideological, and whose representatives on the ground should be given more or less absolute power in the interest of the greater good.

Sadly the way this idea has played out in the Arab world has restricted those people - most of whom were, in effect, agents of the very subservience they professed to battle with - generals or mullas. Surely it was precisely July 1952 that we rose up against in January. July 1952 and its eventual disintegration, via corrupt and bloodied, Cold War-mired capitalism - also and eternally military - into Jihad and/or Salafism, no?

If the July order of governance and consciousness up to and including oppositional politics is not what we rose up against, prompted by Facebook, then maybe there will be a fourth and a fifth "revolution", each of which will see greater erosion of the values the previous one held up. Until we end up exactly where we started. Eternal recurrence, or Ground Hog Day. Or let us say we will remain nearer the anus of the anthropomorphic globe than any other organ.

Long live the eagle that feeds on our limbs. Amen!