A friend of mine calls himself a "political smoker".
He doesn't smoke. He never has.
But told some time ago at a Los Angeles supper club that he and other
members would henceforward be forbidden to smoke, his immediate reaction was
to borrow a cigarette from somebody sitting nearby, stand, and light it up in
protest. As he sees it, his interests, in terms of his individual and civil
rights, run parallel with those of smokers who are being increasingly stripped
of theirs.
I am a former smoker.
I quit cold more than a year ago, after suffering a heart attack. Even
before that, I never claimed that smoking is good for anybody, just that I had
always enjoyed doing it—and that a great many lies were being told about it
by individuals and groups who had gone beyond non-smoking to become anti-
smokers.
But I, too, remain a political smoker.
Exactly like many another do-gooder-targetted group, smokers today are
well along in the process of losing their human rights—and more and more,
it seems, their very humanity—to social parasites who, as H.L. Mencken is
reputed to have put it long ago, awaken in the middle of the night, sweat-
drenched and trembling with the morbid fear that somewhere, someone might be
happy. Until now, there hasn't been an effective way to crush these lice on
the American body politic—and their bloodsucking symbionts in media and
government—between the thumb of the Ninth Amendment and the forefinger of
the First.
Until now.
Let me suggest a couple of ways to begin dealing with them. Of course
you're free to employ one or the other, or both, or go off and think something
up yourself ...
Although I smoked two packs of Marlboros a day for 30 years, I indulged
in cigars and pipes, as well. One thing I still haven't been able to do is
dispose of my collection of the latter. Some I inherited from my father and
an uncle. They're pretty, they were chosen to express my personality—the
same way you buy a hat—and they still smell wonderful. I keep my ancient
favorite on my desktop to this day, and although I'll never put tobacco in it
again and light it, I still pick it up—it feels comfortingly familiar in my
hand—fondle it, and hang it off my lower teeth for a contemplative moment
or two.
Drug paraphernalia.
So far, it hasn't left the house since that night last summer when I was
rushed to the emergency room with unbearable pains in my chest and left arm.
But I'm thinking of taking it on a field trip to the non-smoking section of a
restaurant or two. I know what will happen, and so, if you think about it, do
you.
There are non-smokers like me, and then there are anti-smokers.
The anti-smokers all around me will begin to fidget.
They'll mutter to themselves and each other.
They'll glare at me.
Because what they're all about—what they've always been all about—
has absolutely nothing to do with the presence or absence of first- or second-
or third-hand smoke and whether it harms anybody or not. That's only their
excuse.
What it has to do with is the complete unsuitability, in their twisted
minds, of simple human pleasure in the lives of everyone around them. This
used to be the preoccupation of Puritanical religions. Today, most of the
people of this bent have abandoned religion, but they haven't abandoned the
demented ecstasy they experience by shouting "Thou shalt not!" at everyone in
sight—and being able to back it up with the brute force of governmental
edict.
If I'm especially lucky, they'll complain to the management who'll be
forced to confront me and my empty, tobaccoless pipe and ask me to put it back
in my pocket or leave the restaurant. Either that or, at my suggestion, the
management will go back to the nicotine Nazis at the next table and tell them
where to put their complaints—not in their pockets, but where the sun never
shines.
So ... My first suggestion is that you become a political smoker. Go
to the nearest drugstore and pick out an inexpensive pipe, a pipe that's never
had tobacco in it, a pipe that likely never will, a pipe that strikes you as
attractive or expresses some aspect of your personality. They make all kinds
of pretty ones, not only briar, but gold, silver, inlaid, or enameled. Think
of it as a fashion accessory or an item of jewelry. Don't worry that it
serves no practical purpose. What practical purpose does an earring or a
necktie serve?
Display it in your favorite restaurant, on the bus, at the theater, at a
children's daycare center. What your empty pipe will accomplish is to inform
beleaguered smokers that they're not alone, as media and government would have
them believe. It will inform Prohibitionists that their reign of terror is
coming to a long-overdue end, that they're up against a civilized solidarity
that maintains the human, Constitutional, and American right to go to hell in
your own way.
There used to be a certain class of people—people of a certain
color—who by longstanding evil custom were forbidden to sit anywhere on a bus but
at the back. After a century or so of such nonsense, one of them courageously
refused to abide by this evil custom, and she changed the course of American
history forever.
On another occasion, another class of people—those who for reasons of
their own enjoy nicotine in its many forms—were also limited to the back of
the bus.
Today, even that has been taken away.
My second suggestion to you is that we call such people
"niccers"—after their recreational drug of choice—as loudly and as often as we can,
so that the average tobacco Prohibitionist—say, California Congressman
Henry Waxman, as nasty a piece of work as I've ever seen in more than three
decades of political observation—will realize precisely who and what he has
become.
I'm a political niccer.
Are you one, too?