http://www.nationalreview.com/node/416985/print Starving for Publicity: Hunger-Strikers for Loretta Lynch
They make a mockery of an honorable method of protest.
By Ian Tuttle — April 15, 2015
In his memoir A World Apart, the Polish dissident Gustaw Herling, recounting his time as a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp during World War II, writes: “Towards the end of November 1941, four months after the general amnesty for Polish prisoners in Russian camps had been announced, when I knew that I should not survive until spring and when I had given up all hope of being released, I decided to go on a hunger-strike in protest.”
Contrast Herling’s situation, inside the Soviet Union’s gulag archipelago, to that of the world’s newest hunger strikers. Reports Politico, an “advocacy group founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton, along with female civil-rights leaders, are launching [a] hunger strike — where groups of fasters will alternate days abstaining from food until Lynch is confirmed to replace Eric Holder at the Justice Department.”
Hunger striking has been used by the noble and the wicked — on one hand, Herling and Gandhi; on the other, primped and pampered Guantanamo Bay detainees — but it would be difficult to think of a more petty use of this morally coercive tactic, or a more laughable exercise of it (note that these so-called hunger strikers are not as much striking as collectively dieting). To what do we owe this latest nonsense?
Writing at The Federalist late last month, Hans Fiene observed about the post-Selma generation: “After years of hearing those saints sing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ we were overcome with jealousy. We coveted Selma. We envied that march. We looked at that footage and hungered for our own cause to devour.”
To “Selma envy” he attributed the hysteria over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the broader treatment of same-sex-marriage rights as a matter of urgent and world-historical importance.
But that argument also applies to present-day race activists, who, much to their chagrin, have found 21st-century America much progressed from the place their parents and grandparents knew. It is far from perfect, but it is no longer 1965. The problem is, they want to matter like it’s 1965. It is for that reason that they have imparted the moral urgency of the March on Washington to police shootings, brunch demographics — and, now, the Loretta Lynch nomination.
The reaction of Democrats to the stalled Lynch nomination has been political theater of the absurd: Lynch “is being asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar,” proclaimed Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) on the Senate floor in March. It was a shameful comment. Rosa Parks would be able to distinguish between genuine racism and the various sloughs of despond into which nominees to high office are almost guaranteed to fall during the untidy process between nomination and vote.
Of course, one ought not to neglect the rank partisanship here: Durbin was noticeably less exercised about the plight of Judge Janice Rogers Brown, appointed by George W. Bush in 2003 to be the first black woman on the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals, who waited 684 days — nearly two years — for a vote. Among the Democrats who filibustered her vote? Senator Dick Durbin, who also ultimately voted against her. Durbin opposed, too, Condoleezza Rice’s nomination as secretary of state.
And, of course, no one fasted for secretary nominee Rice.
But the more important point is the unmistakable loss of a sense of moral proportion: Loretta Lynch is Rosa Parks, Michael Brown is Emmett Till. It’s no coincidence that the Lynch hunger-strikers are connected to Al Sharpton; that charlatan has made a career of drawing moral equivalences where they do not exist, then encouraging “solutions” — in a phrase, “No justice! No peace!” — best reserved for the worst abuses.
It is envy that moves them, and envy of the strangest sort: The Sharptons of the world, and their disciples, wish that things were worse, so that they could be the ones to make them better. They make Loretta Lynch the victim of racism, that they can be her liberators. They fast, so that we will see them fasting.
In our pages in 2010, my colleague Jay Nordlinger mused:
It seems to me that a hunger strike should be a last resort — a last, desperate act when no other option is available. Hunger strikes in a democracy are hard to justify, in my view. They are often stunt-like and selfish. Moreover, they make a mockery of hunger strikes by the truly desperate. In a democracy, we have an abundance of options.
There are more options for agitating available to supporters of Loretta Lynch than have ever been available to any people in any place in history, not least because of the very real sacrifices made by people of all sorts who faced very real challenges throughout the nation’s history. And there are great causes today that call for equal or greater sacrifice.
But the morally stunted among us prefer moral stunts that exaggerate the inconsequential and belittle the historic, and in so doing damage both our past and our present.
— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.
