When famous people fast

  • Fast­ing is in, but it turns out that when peo­ple in the news fast, you don’t want to blink or you’ll miss it. Silly us, we thought that it wasn’t a fast if it didn’t involve any actual hunger. Thank good­ness the worldly folk are here to show us the way.

    First it was Sad­dam Hus­sein, who went on a hunger strike in late June. You didn’t hear about this? That’s not too sur­pris­ing. Even in the age of bullet-speed infor­ma­tion, the cam­eras wouldn’t have been able to roll before he wound things up. Accord­ing to Reuters:

    Hus­sein ended a brief hunger strike after miss­ing just one meal in his U.S.-run prison, a U.S. mil­i­tary spoke­man said on Fri­day. The for­mer Iraqi leader had refused lunch on Thurs­day in protest of the killing of one of his lawyers by gun­men, but the spokesman said he ate his evening meal.

    And once Sad­dam showed them the way, Cindy Shee­han & c. real­ized a hunger strike was just the thing.

    About 150 pro­test­ers sat in front of the White House on Mon­day to savor their last meal before start­ing a hunger strike that some said will con­tinue until Amer­i­can troops return from Iraq.

    The demon­stra­tion mark­ing the Inde­pen­dence Day hol­i­day was orga­nized by Code­Pink, a women’s anti-war group that called on vol­un­teers to abstain from eat­ing for 24 hours from mid­night on Monday.

    24 hours. Are they kid­ding with this?

    No. As always, they are totally, totally seri­ous. And they’ve got Names.

    [Spokes­woman Mered­ith] Dear­born said 2,700 other activists nation­wide, includ­ing actors Susan Saran­don and Sean Penn, would work as a relay team pass­ing the fast daily from one to another.

    A relay fast! Omigosh, why didn’t I think of that? Dor­mi­tion fast, Apostle’s fast, Advent fast, Lent — they’d fly by. I’d take Mon­day, Wednes­day, Fri­day; Greg could take Tues­day, Thurs­day, Sat­ur­day. We’d “relay” on Sun­day. Heck, if we had had a bunch of kids, we’d only get one day a week. Now that’s a fast. Take that, war-mongering hate-monkeys! Pass the donuts — my timer just went off.

    In answer to when the “hunger” part of a hunger strike became an abstract con­cept, last week’s Weekly Stan­dard quoted from a 1997 arti­cle that indi­cated the source of the inspi­ra­tion might have been the mae­stro of PR activism himself:

    Jesse Jack­son, who’s been known to call hunger strikes one day and show up at ban­quets the next, invented rag-team strik­ing a few years back. After refus­ing solids on behalf of Hait­ian immi­grants or Cal­i­for­nia grape work­ers, Jack­son then allows some­body else — some­body as hun­gry for pub­lic­ity as Jack­son is for food — to take over his fast. Jack­son calls this ‘pass­ing the cross’ down ‘the chain of suffering.’

    “Pass­ing the cross.” Don’t even get me started.

    To be fair, there are some in Sheehan’s bunch — includ­ing actor and long-time furious-guy Dick Gre­gory and Shee­han her­self — that are avow­ing they’ll strike until the troops come home. If they mean that, of course, they’ll starve to death. When the IRA’s Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike — a real hunger strike — in prison in 1981, he died in 65 days. Sixty-five days wouldn’t be enough time to bring the troops home no mat­ter what happened.

    So say good­bye to Cindy Shee­han, Dick Gre­gory and the oth­ers (and con­grat­u­late Sean Penn and Susan Saran­don on los­ing a pound in time for beach sea­son). Looks like we’ll be short of anti-war ranters by Octo­ber. But they shouldn’t worry. As Terri Schiavo’s hus­band Michael could have told them, death by star­va­tion is “a very calm, peace­ful procedure.”

    ***
    Follow-up: The Shee­han crowd tried to sing “Amer­ica the Beau­ti­ful” with bile-filled lyrics on the White House lawn and were taken down a peg by a young singing group. Kind of reminds me of the scene in “Casablanca” where the Nazis and the French resis­tance fight­ers duel over their anthems. And the bad guys lost that time too.

    Go here and click on the sec­ond media win­dow down for the video.


    Related posts:

    1. When no one was look­ing, Cindy Shee­han went com­pletely mad
    2. Dems with­out a plan
    3. Heck­uva speech going on
    4. Bush’s great speech
    5. It’s fall! I’m draw­ing as fast as I can!

    July 4th, 2006 | Grace | 11 Comments |

11 Responses and Counting...

  • Jim Nel­son 07.04.2006

    It brings a whole new mean­ing to “fast.” Forty days is slow … real slow, but 24 hours is pretty quick and miss­ing a meal, well that’s just plain fast. Maybe they’re on to something.

  • Grace

    Exactly. These inge­nious folks are just cor­rect­ing our phraseology.

    And not to be a total skep­tic, but I’m bet­ting you don’t want to look too close at what they do for the 24 hours. Not their fault really. The world has not been teach­ing peo­ple any­thing about restraint and delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion recently. (If it ever did.)

  • Deb

    Makes one won­der what Bobby Sand’s fam­ily thinks of these people.

    Deb

  • Mimi

    I like the idea of a relay fast, snort.

  • Grace

    Deb:
    A hunger strike is really such a pecu­liar form of protest any­way. I think Gandhi is the only one who really made a dif­fer­ence by doing it. What pro­test­ers need to accu­rately assess before they declare they’re on a hunger strike is if they are really per­ceived by the major­ity of those around them as a force for good. If they’re not, say­ing they’re not eat­ing sounds about the same as a spoiled child say­ing he’ll hold his breath unless he gets what he wants. It’s pos­si­ble to go on a hunger strike and have it be (iron­i­cally) more self-indulgent than anything.

    So yeah, I’m think­ing Sands’ next of kin hunts these peo­ple down and slaps them around.

  • Greg Brooks

    Noth­ing to add here, except a pub­lic dec­la­ra­tion that this is a really, really great post. :)

  • Grace

    Hey cool! I love when that hap­pens. :-D

  • Scot Larsen

    Hey Diane! Great post. My wife directed me over here to check out your post on the “relay fast.” My per­sonal favorite Cindy Shee­han quote is she would rather Venzuela’s Hugo Chavez than under Bush. I am tak­ing a col­lec­tion to buy her a one-way ticket.

    Scot

  • Grace

    Hey, greet­ings and Happy Father’s Day and all that!

    Shee­han: I’ll chip in on that ticket. I’m kind of think­ing that if she arrived there with­out major press cov­er­age, she’d be amazed to find that Chavez would put her to work pick­ing crops.

    Hon­estly, wouldn’t you think that when she was say­ing dur­ing the Kat­rina emer­gency efforts that fed­eral troops were *invad­ing* Louisiana, all the cam­era crews would just exchange glances and pack up? She’s a total loon, and yet they keep giv­ing her air-time and an absolute pass on any hard ques­tions as if she’s a reli­gious figure.

  • Greg

    Ooooh, you’re a trend­set­ter. Hot Air and Michelle Malkin just did a full video send-up of this story: http://hotair.com/archives/vent/2006/07/14/gain-w…

    This Side Of Glory: Whomp­ing the big con­ser­v­a­tive sites… well, at least this once.

  • Grace

    Yeah, and you’re dying for me to men­tion that you were the one that sent the story to me. :-)

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required