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.”

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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.