AbbaGav

In case you don't know, today is a Jewish fast day, the 17th of the Hebrew month of Tammuz.

For most adult observant Jews without health issues, or who aren't busy being bombed, this is a day for abstaining not only from food, but from all drink as well. That is how Jewish fasts work, since they are supposed to afflict the body and rouse one from complacency. As I sit here not eating and not drinking, I thought I'd check in on another person who is probably fasting today, also in an attempt to physically afflict herself as a moral statement, Cindy Sheehan. Courtesy of Wild Thing from PC Free Zone, we get a hunger strike update from Cindy Sheehan about how her fast is going:

I find traveling out of the country very challenging being on a fast. When I was on a layover in Madrid on my way to Venice, Italy yesterday, the closest thing I could find to a smoothie to get a little protein was a coffee with vanilla ice cream in it. Traveling for 22 hours is very taxing under normal circumstances--but then again, when have we had normal circumstances since the 2000 and 2004 successful coup attempts that have brought BushCo into power?

I traveled from Venice to the frontier of Italy to the province of Udine which is right at the foot of the pre-Alps. I am here for a huge youth festival which includes many elements of social justice and peace work. It is beautiful and the air feels different from other places that I have travelled. It is strangely soft and gentle as is the natural light. However, there is not a Jamba Juice on every corner, so blended juice drinks with protein powder are impossible to find. [...]

Stop, Cindy, enough! You're making me hungry for vanilla ice cream. Or even a small cup of water would be nice.

That was, of course, several days ago already. But I have some exclusive new information from our prolific protester. Based on her ice-cream-smoothie-fast's overwhelming success in gaining her publicity and air travel, she's apparently decided to launch some more protests in the near future, all for a good cause:

Well this whole hunger strike business has actually been kind of fun. I'm finding myself really getting into this whole Bobby Sands, streets of Birmingham, Ghandi kind of mentality. And I think I'm good at it too. So I thought I'd pick some more new goals and some different forms of moral-self-expression besides hunger striking, just for a little change of pace and to show that I'm a master of every kind of protest.

1. boycott: I will not be shopping at any military base commissaries. I don't want to contribute to the military industrial complex -- unless I'm doing a protest at the base and the commissary has vanilla ice cream and banana smoothies, but then THEY'RE contributing to MY cause so it's ok!
   
2. walkathon: I will be walking across america, or what's left of it. Well, across the blue states. Crossing the red states I'll be using an airconditioned bus with an industrial juicer and a treadmill.
   
3. petition: We're going to submit every american's name on our petition -- every one of them -- and if that isn't a moral imperative then I don't know what is. Just need to finalize negotations with the census bureau and the government printing department to have them laser-jet all those names for us for free under the Freedom of Something Or Other Act -- getting the government to do it is sooo much easier than writing them all in ourselves.
   
4. sit-in: at the White House. Well, more precisely, a sit-near. I've rented a hotel room near the White House so I can have a sit-near protest of George Bush's dicktatorial policies.

And what am I -- I mean we -- looking to achieve with these additional examples of our moral superiority?

I ask myself, why can't our military be more like Hizbullah? For God's sakes look at what those freedom fighters can do -- they launch a bunch of missiles, burst across the border, kill and kidnap a few people, lob some more rockets and then hightail it out of there. Now that's the way a military should operate. None of this occupation. None of this "sticking around until our innocent little boys get killed" crap. And you can see the world respects that, or at least the French do -- I still think most everybody else will come around after a few days, when the Zionist press has quieted down a bit.

And while I'm on the subject, why can't we run our military prisons more the way Palestinians do? There is so much wisdom in these native cultures that are being threatened by occupation. We should be learning from them before the Jews kill them all. Palestinian prisons are great. There's no torture. They let them go on the weekends, they have cell phones. Conjugal visits. The works. And then the prisoners are released way, way ahead of schedule. Plus they get Europeans to oversee their security, but from a distance. I would love it if we had Europeans monitoring our gulags.

Well, I hope you'll all join me at Camp Casey. Or just do your sit-not-so-near in your own home town, so long as you stand with me against this illegal regime wherever you're sitting.

Note, just to clarify things, that the first quote above is genuine Cindy. And we'll just say that you can't prove the second one is not, even if it does come across as somewhat AbbaGav-ish.