What's All the Fuming About?

• Share

(2 of 2)

In real life, smokers cannot pretend they don't care. They know they are plague victims and suspect they may be carriers. So they try meeting a censorious society halfway. They puff on their butts behind a closed office door, and indulge their health-nut friends by abstaining from cigarettes during the dinner hour -- which, without a nicotine fix, seems to stretch on for days.

But they cannot erase the stigma. Smoking is seen, and smelled, as an insult to civilization. It is also one of the few insults that civilization can forcefully address. The mannerly middle class may not be able to outlaw assault weapons or rap music or violent movies, but it can shove smokers (usually the working class, the minorities and the young) into the pariah class, right next to the serial killers.

These days, of course, even multiple murderers are treated to the panoply of psychiatric do-gooding. So are compulsive gamblers, foot fetishists and people who still like Meat Loaf. Cigarette smokers are virtually the only addicts who can't count on federal help or sympathy. If only they were hooked on booze, say, they could receive official succor for crimes even worse than fouling the lungs of themselves and their loved ones. We don't know of one husband who battered his wife because he'd smoked too much that night. We haven't heard of any fatal car crashes caused by a driver whose "one for the road" was a * Virginia Slim. Smoking shortens lives; alcohol ruins them too.

But no one will share smokers' illegal-alien status. Cigarette users must huddle in the ragtag solidarity of their serene, intense habit. Defiantly, they say, "We look so cool, don't we, waving our wicked wands in the air. Our voices have the knowing, late-night duskiness of alto-sax jazz. We pack more fun into life because we know, better than all those who stare darts our way, how short life is. We are nature's bravados, medicine's death-row aesthetes." As the health magazines remind us, absolutely everything can kill you. So smokers figure they may as well go out with a smile on their lips, a stain on their teeth and a wheeze in their outcast hearts.

Can we reach a compromise, O America of the New Prohibition? I'll light up a little less; you lighten up a little more.