Revenge Of The Pink Panther

Sooner or later Cindy Sheehan will be labelled "frigid."
Sooner or later (insert random name) will be labelled "anorexic."

But sooner or later everybody else will understand that such is life.
I never fasted for Lent, Good Friday or any of the other many Holy Days of obligation prescribed as one of the traditionally acceptable displays for those upholding sound morality, good Catholic boy that I was... could never help wondering (despite its proven political successes) : what's the point?

But in this month's Harper's, the Notebook article by Luke Mitchell is called "God Mode" and deals specifically with the topic of Guantanamo Bay prisoners being force-fed by U.S. soldiers when they go on hunger strikes to protest their conditions of detainment. Two sentences sum up the ethics at work :

After all, if a hunger strike is the final attempt by the powerless to assert their autonomy -- "a person's last, ultimate means of protesting" -- then force-feeding is the ultimate rejection of that autonomy. In that it reduces its subject to a state of total submission, powerless even within the bounds of his or her own flesh, force-feeding is no less violent an act than is rape.

Since these Code Pink ladies and gentlemen are fasting to end a war, maybe I'm all turned around on the subject. It's amazing how mettle will inspire ordinary people... which of course we all are.. . ...despite the protestations of the self-aggrandized.