Moonbat Fast

Via Michelle Malkin: Cindy Sheehan pigs out on ice cream during her "fast" (scroll down):

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.

Malkin: "Smoothies. Coffee. Vanilla Ice Cream. How much weight does she plan on gaining during this deprivation campaign?"

I've often thought a few things about Cindy Sheehan. First, she is (or was, at least at the beginning) a genius for self-promotion (as right-wing Michael Savage said on the radio viz Camp Pendleton, there is no effective response to a hysterical mother). Second, her feelings for her dead son notwithstanding, she simply loves the attention; God knows, going on "Hardball" and "The Situation Room" sure as hell beats playing Canasta with the rest of the over-50 set back home in San Diego.

Third, and more important, there is simply something wrong with how she behaves, something--in the end--that is deeply offensive to all of us. In my lifetime, I've lost all four of my grandparents, whom I loved in different ways but fiercely, each one of them. I can close my eyes and remember the smells of where they lived, the adoration they poured on me, their boundless generosity. One grandfather, my mother's father, took me to Penn Station in Newark to watch the trains come in and leave, looked at the boards, then pointed to train after train and said, this one is going to Washington, this one to Chicago. My other grandfather, my father's father, once took me on the ferry that encircled Manhattan, past the United Nations and Yankee Stadium and, yes, the Twin Towers (these came first, though it seems right to list them last). On the trip, he pointed to a hospital where, he said, he had washed dishes in the cafeteria where the nurses ate. He let me know, without having to say so, that he had despised those nurses, who had probably treated the git off the boat from Glasgow with contempt.

I've just described two of the greatest days of my life, just to let you know.

One man was the Irish Pop-pop, all hugs, holding me as a baby and not letting anyone else near me, looking at me as if I were God's greatest creation. The other, the Scottish Grandpa, not given to overt displays of affection, but letting me know in a thousand quiet, formal ways what I meant to him; for instance, knowing I was an admirer of the author John O'Hara, and then gently offering, when I visited him in Pennsylvania, to drive the twenty miles to Pottsville, to O'Hara's hometown, to the O'Hara statue and to O'Hara's birthplace, across the street (as Grandpa knew I knew) from a brewery. And not a word of prompting from me.

Yes: losing one's grandparents is the way of the world. Well, I've also lost friends--the latest was a professor/writer, a confidant with a whinny of a laugh who was finally, in his forties, beginning to break into hardcover. I lost a friend in high school, fourteen years old, who I last saw the night we each had our first beer. Lowenbrau. I've lost a co-worker, an English professor universally admired, who took a bullet in the forehead from a serial killer.

Granted, in the calculus of Cindy Sheehan's world, none of this trumps the loss of a child. Fair enough. But all of us experience grief; we endure catharsis. And then, almost callous to say, we get on with our lives; we go on as the living after paying proper respects to the dead. It can't be otherwise, because to do otherwise is to become dead ourselves. Cindy Sheehan--fasting on only ice cream and smoothies, crying at the drop of a TV camera, moving toward the creepiest elements of the anti-Bush set, has, I'm sorry, still some growing up to do.