Readers will recall a lady I knew in Texas, who maintained the best effective diet I’ve ever seen.  She fasted one day each week, usually Friday.  By maintaining tight self-discipline that one day, she made her self-discipline more effective the rest of the week.  I was fascinated by her notion that self-discipline was just another “muscle” that needs exercise – use it or lose it!

Readers will also recall I’ve been trying to limit the intellectual pollution I receive, which some people call the presidential campaign, and therefore avoid all TV news on Saturdays.  It is not really the same thing, because it is difficult to fast from food but easy to fast from intellectual pollution.  The most difficult part of fasting from TV news is sealing it off.  Televisions on Friday night must be set on a non-news station for the next morning.  Car radios must be changed.  Yet, this pollution still seeps into your day.  Yesterday, I maintained my isolation from the campaign quite successfully, until my excitable wife rushed into the master bath, where I was taking a shower, to announce breathlessly that “I just heard the latest poll out of Florida shows Trump beating Rubio by 22 points.”  While that was interesting, what was I supposed to do with that information?  Do I therefore wash the left arm instead of the right arm?  It had no value, except entertainment value.  There was certainly no investment value to that information.

It is not the broadcast news I want to avoid but the breathless 24/7 live coverage of the campaign that pollutes the soul.  While we are being entertained by the tasteless reality show called the presidential campaign, we are paying too little attention to other things.  For example, there is a genuine humanitarian crisis building quickly in Europe right now, with a million people in jeopardy.  If Europe as a whole handles this crisis as poorly as France handled the refugee crisis from their Algerian war, then the Eurozone will cease to exist.  (It is not a coincidence that Europe’s terrorist attacks have been primarily in France.)  After all, is it more important to be conversant about this huge pending crisis or Donald Trump’s non-huge . . . hands?

So, what started out as an exercise in self-discipline is now too easy.  It has become more of a management problem – how to seal it off, rather than how to force myself to live without it.

Maybe, the problem is that television only has one real advantage over others news sources, i.e., the ability to convey emotion or urgency by being breathless?

Two words you never see in the same sentence are breathless and intellectual.

I think I need to find another way to exercise my self-discipline “muscle?  Without fasting from food, that is.  After all, why would anybody fast from food . . . when there are so many key lime pies out there, just waiting to be eaten?