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Thread 4045

Thread ID: 4045 | Posts: 14 | Started: 2002-12-16

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RobertLevin [OP]

2002-12-16 19:42 | User Profile

An Open Letter from the Inveterate Smoker to the Antismoking Crusaders

“Do you smell that? Someone must be smoking in here. IS SOMEONE SMOKING IN HERE?”

Yeah, someone is smoking in here. It’s me. I’m smoking tenaciously and unapologetically. And the next fool who asks that question within earshot of me, I’m gonna spill his yogurt into his sneakers and scatter his lecithin granules.

I know I’m expected to be contrite about my cigarette habit and that the unrepentant attitude I’m displaying is a source of consternation to you. You wonder how I justify it. Could I somehow remain ignorant of the jeopardy my cigarette puts you in?

Well, I could remind you that studies from which you draw your ammunition—studies by the National Cancer Institute and the World Health Organization—have been shown to be less than reliable. I could point out that one of these studies was, in fact, deemed fraudulent by a federal court, and that the only certain instance of a smoker killing a nonsmoker was the stabbing of a California waiter who demanded that a restaurant customer extinguish his cigarette. I could get into this. But the possibility that the danger I represent to you has been exaggerated, or that it may even be bogus, has nothing to do with my position. Even if I were thoroughly persuaded that side-stream smoke is a genuine threat to you, your face in my cigarette would still provoke my ire.

So where am I coming from? Why am I holding on? Am I helplessly nicotine-dependent? The prisoner of a compulsive oral fixation? One of those combination suicidal/homicidal maniacs who wants to take you out along with himself? Worse, am I some kind of First Amendment freak?

No. It’s none of the above. What it is, friends, is something we have in common, something we share. Like you I’m dealing with an outsized fear of dying.

Just like you (whether you conceptualize it in this manner or not). I live too intimately with the knowledge that I was born under a death sentence that can’t be pardoned and that might be invoked at any time and in any of myriad ways. And just as it does with you, my hyperawareness of my ultimate dissolution—of the hideous fate that nature has in store for me—forces me to live not only with too much consciousness of my vulnerability but also with a crippling burden of guilt.

I must have done some serious sh*t to be in so much trouble.

So, like you, and in order to fully partake of the world, I need to feel less vulnerable, less guilty and less afraid. Like you I need to believe that I have some control over my destiny and that I’m doing what I can to perpetuate myself for as long as possible. Where we part company is in how we’re pursuing our internal equilibrium, in what we’ve discovered can work for us in this regard.

What you’ve been handed with the certification of tobacco as the “number one cause of preventable death” is a winnable battle to wage with mortality—a project which, by every measure, is a terrific way to address and alleviate dread and diminish guilt. Indeed, it can be an intoxicating thing. You can float around believing that you’re securing an extension of your life by ridding the air of a lethal pollutant. At the same time, you can feel that by protecting other lives—by the absolute righteousness of this work—you’re acquitting yourself of any and all transgressions in past lives or in this one. If you become sufficiently obsessive about it you can even get to feel sometimes that EVERYTHING that’s wrong has been reduced to a single locus and that you’re engaging—and wounding—evil itself. Not only can you move with less trepidation in the world, but you’re positioning yourself for an ultimate promotion to heaven, an infinite perpetuation of yourself.

That’s a very good deal.

But if the “bad news” about cigarettes has been a boon for you it’s also presented me with an opportunity to address my problem with mortality. I’m referring, specifically, to the denouement of cancer that cigarettes propose. Cancer, at once the most insidious and retributive of diseases and a disease which ordinarily takes decades to develop.

My emotional circumstances inclining me to assume the worst as a given, it was automatic for me to interpret the authoritative conclusion that I risked the most hideous of consequences when I smoked as a certainty. I immediately took it for granted that I would die of cancer if I smoked. If, for you, a similar reaction was reason to demonize cigarettes, for me the opposite was true. My attraction to cigarettes, already strong but not yet compulsive, took the leap into addiction. I recognized that there was an inherent blessing in the certainty of a cigarette-induced death, and that it was a considerable one.

When, and not so long ago, smoking was perceived as a minor vice or a vaguely unhealthy practice, the best you could do with a cigarette was to use it as a surrogate tit to suck on in moments of tension or as an aid in the fabrication of a social posture designed to mask insecurity and self-doubt. Cigarettes were a wonderful anodyne and piece of business, but those functions constituted the limits of their utility. Now, however, I could derive that much and more from cigarettes.

By smoking cigarettes, by implicitly taking on the most terrible of deaths, I could affect an arrangement with nature that served to ease my anxieties at their very root. By embracing the ultimate punishment, I could, that is, own a sense of being insulated against all other causes of death. And armored in this way by my cigarette habit I could feel not only less susceptible to croaking by accident, violence or germs, but significantly free of the constraints guilt imposed on my ability to experience pleasure.

Moreover, with my sense of immunity to such eventualities, I could feel something like confident of thirty to forty years of survival on the planet—many more years, certainly, than I could otherwise feel confident of. Finally, I could feel that cigarettes might ultimately assure my salvation itself, that I could arrive at the moment of judgment having fully atoned for my felonies as well as my misdemeanors and with at least a balanced rap sheet.

You expect me to give this up?

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that what I’ve come up with is insane, stupid, grotesque and awful and, in this case, you’ll be right. But inasmuch as your cause is fueled by what, just perhaps, is less than solid fact, and since you’ve placed yourself on the side of angels who after all may not exist, I would think you’d appreciate that certain existential horrors are impervious to rational responses. Insanity and stupidity, I’d think you would agree, are often best understood, not as handicaps or pathological conditions, but as marvels of human resourcefulness.

So are we straight with this now? What we have here is a collision of self-perpetuation projects and given the urgency of our needs and the diametric opposition of our methods, a situation without an equitable resolution. I mean, I don’t want to hurt anybody but, much as I’d prefer it otherwise, I can’t demonstrate any more consideration for your need to stay afloat in a creation than you can for mine.

Of course in this respect we’re alike still again. We both mimic nature herself.

weisbrot

2002-12-16 19:58 | User Profile

Originally posted by RobertLevin@Dec 16 2002, 15:42 **An Open Letter from the Inveterate Smoker to the Antismoking Crusaders

**

                Oy vey!!!

All of these words, you have! When you could have just wailed: "I wanna be G-D!!!!!"

Itz so complex...

Ed Toner

2002-12-16 21:45 | User Profile

Robert - This is an issue that bothers me, too. I am not a smoker, but my wife is.

The anti-smokers are a nut bunch, if you ask me. I think the dangers of cigarrette smoke are exagerated, and the so-called measures taken to seperate smokers from non-smokers in restraunts and the like are ridiculous.

I think a lot of the present airline woes stem from the fact that they have discriminated against 20% of the travelling public. No smoking in planes, and in many cases, terminals as well. I know people who will not fly now unless it is absolutely necessary to do so, because they are addicted to the cigarrette.

It affects the crews, too. I have had trips where my co-pilot and flight engineer were both smokers, and they were real jumpy. I gave them permission to light up, but some of the hostitutes who came into the cockpit went into hissy fits. Piss on them - I'm boss.

madrussian

2002-12-17 00:33 | User Profile

Hostitutes? Is that what professional slang is for female flight attendants? :lol:

John Wayne

2002-12-17 04:42 | User Profile

A small example of "recruiting."

Here's what I meant by that

Is anybody cruising sites, or accumulating eMail addresses? Hopefully yes, and sending them along with a note to

"Check out the 'Original Dissent' discussion board. Lots of free interesting opinion there, not censored."

[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php]http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php[/url]

If every guy/girl that posts on this discussion board sent that message out to ten different addresses every day a one percent connection would make it a worthy effort. (Open a web based eMail account strictly used for that if you don't want to deal with return messages).

Not difficult at all, and scarfing ten eMail addreses off the web each day takes about 15 minutes at the most.

As it stands, you are all chatting with each other and that accomplishes nothing except pleasurable conversation. You are all isolated, speaking with only each other, and that is a regrettable waste of time. The overwhelming majority of you are quite literate and intelligent, but you spend all of your time chatting each other up, which accomplishes nothing.

Recruit, godammit, in your spare time. The above requires perhaps a half hour, maybe one hour a day. Make people aware of your discussion board, or some website that you feel they should see. At least that has the possiblity of furthering the effort. It's better than a permanently closed coffee klatsch among 20 people who spend day after day fondling each other's genitals. SEND your URL around to ten strangers every day -- you're going to get some hatemail in return, but at least you'll be doing SOMETHING.

John Wayne G

John Wayne

2002-12-17 05:33 | User Profile

An English point of view, if you're interested

[url=http://www.drypool.net/cgi-bin/system.pl?id=isdgb]http://www.drypool.net/cgi-bin/system.pl?id=isdgb[/url]

John Wayne G

Robbie

2002-12-17 05:34 | User Profile

There is a billboard which faces the Port Authority (41st St. and 8th Ave.) in New York City which depicts a 1950's cigarette advertisement. The man says, "Mind if I smoke?". The woman replies, "Care if I die?"

If that isn't typical knee-jerk idiocy coming from the "second hand smoke" advocates, I don't know what is.

il ragno

2002-12-17 09:38 | User Profile

There is a billboard which faces the Port Authority (41st St. and 8th Ave.) in New York City which depicts a 1950's cigarette advertisement. The man says, "Mind if I smoke?". The woman replies, "Care if I die?"

"Please, I insist", I always reply to that woman in the billboard.

It's funny how cigarette smokers are treated as worse than cocaine or heroin addicts, even though nobody is stealing tv sets or mugging old folks to feed their Marlboro habit. (Yet.) Got AIDS from buggery or IV drug use? Right this way - no shortage of taxpayer-funded programs to alleviate your suffering and restore you to a healthy, productive ass bandit/ghetto skell.

But there ain't a municipality on Earth that offers its tobacco-fiends free gum or Nicoderm patches out of 'concern' for their health. Turns out smokers - being part of that great mooing herd of taxable cattle - are punished for their 'illness', ostracized publicly, and expected to jones out, cold-turkey; while the same local governments who mouth all those squishy-caring platitudes about 'health' and 'saving lives' will take monies raised from taxes and fines squeezed out of tobacco smokers to make sure junkies and AIDS parasites never want for methadone and AZT.

Sanctimonious hypocrisy - once the sole province of religion - has now become the exclusive property of 'progressive' government. It's all about 'health' - but, by odd coincidence, it's also a great way to raise taxes on working people without seeming to. Like most public-health boondoggles, it's an excuse to send out a phalanx of 'inspectors' armed with a book of blank fines and a daily quota. It also looses a whole new kind of municipal corruption upon the public - or how much do you wanna bet that bar owners & restauranteurs would sooner pay off a bent inspector than lose their licenses? (Believe me, if a DA can indict a ham sandwich, a health inspector can always "find" violations. It's an art.)

It is to laugh! Even as the Nanny State reaches into your pocket to "protect your health", they're waving in a brown foamy tide of Third World immigrants carrying diseases and viruses that no white nation has faced in a century... if ever...and has no natural defense against. West Nile Virus, brain-eating parasites, typhus, smallpox, ebola.....we'll see polio and the Black Death return in force and the govt will still tax YOU to fix it, before they'd turn away a single potential $5-an-hour food service worker to further infect the populace. To our spineless public servants, a Somali hocking the Hanta Virus in your turkey salad is a victim....the guy who eats that salad and lights up a cigarette afterwards is a predator.

xmetalhead

2002-12-17 15:24 | User Profile

On my several past trips to Europe, I always found it refreshing and liberating to smoke cigarettes wherever, whenever I wanted to light up. Not that smoking is a good habit without some negative effects, but I would estimate that the dangers of smoking and second hand smoke are greatly exaggerated. There are carcinogens in many foods we eat which not too many people are enlightened about, which are just as damaging to health as a puff of smoke could be. I've know family friends who have died from lung cancer who NEVER smoked and didnt' work in bars.

It's all an extortion racket run by the gov't, to scare the sh*t outta everyone, which forces people to give up liberties, take certain actions and avoid going places, buy certain products, buy certain drugs, pay more taxes which the gov't controls and profits from.

The anti-smoking campaign is nothing more than government mind control.

Avalanche

2002-12-22 04:35 | User Profile

Okay, just to piss off a bunch of smokers... (tee hee hee!)

RANT: :angry: I don't CARE if it does or doesn't make you sick. I don't care if it kills you-all off before you take medicare or social security. I don't really care whether it's unfairly judged to be unsafe for me... It's ENOUGH for me that it STINKS! It is offensive, even in small doses. Smokers all too often are completely unaware of how bad THEY smell, too! A nonsmoker can pretty much always pick out a smoker by the stink of their clothes (and/) or their hair (and/) or their breath. But smokers never notice it.

And too many of them are either unaware or totally careless about the lit ends -- how often have you carelessly brushed by someone's clothes with a lit one and burned a hole in SOMEONE ELSE'S clothing?! And that's NOT something you can "make up" with an apology! (or a tailor!)

I DON'T want you smoking anywhere I have to be -- and that includes restaurants and airplanes! I'm just as much against stinking bums and wet dogs, but most of them don't fly or eat in good restaurants...

And if it takes laws "based" on putative health effects to keep you-all away from me, fine. Too many other laws are based on less-than-solid ideas. This kind, at least, makes being in public more pleasant! (By the same token, I'm ALL for denying entry to libraries to unwashed stinky 'urban outdoorsmen' or anyone else who is personally offensive.) It's not effective to rely on smokers' consideration for nonsmokers -- CAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE ANY!!!

Rant finished. We return to our usual programming (or unprogramming...)

weisbrot

2002-12-22 06:26 | User Profile

Originally posted by Avalanche@Dec 22 2002, 00:35 **

RANT:  :angry: I don't CARE if it does or doesn't make you sick. I don't care if it kills you-all off before you take medicare or social security.  I don't really care whether it's unfairly judged to be unsafe for me... It's ENOUGH for me that it STINKS!  It is offensive, even in small doses.  It's not effective to rely on smokers' consideration for nonsmokers -- CAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE ANY!!!

**

Good points all. Now go buy some fire insurance.

It is true- to most of the nonsmoking public, burnt tobacco is one step above burnt hair. The smell does linger in clothes and in your hair. There's no reason why those who don't choose to indulge should have to be around the emissions of those who do- smokers can easily hunker down outside. It seems pretty obvious that the government campaign against smokers is just more lies and abuse- I just don't like the smell and the fact of inhaling a product that has been inside someone else's system.

To smelly, stinky, smokers, inconsiderate bastiges that they are (although some of my very best friends are smokers) I'll add to the list that 325 pound sack of crap who sat next to me last week- after I scraped into a standby middle seat- who whined about me lowering the arm rests.

He sez: "I've always thought there's more room without armrests..." Yup- more room for your rolls of flesh to flabber onto my space. Then the guy does the usual elbow-dance for all of the armrest acreage.

Luckily, my cheap lunch began to reap havoc on my system; retaliation was swift yet silent. I'll spare the rest. Suffice it to say that Beefy was somewhat green as we rolled into the gate.

Really big people should buy first class or two coach seats- or not fly.

solutrian

2002-12-28 16:13 | User Profile

If every american quit smoking tomorrow, the anti-smoking wowsers would be off on an other crusade, and another, and another, untill someone came after their own indulgences. It would be very hard to pass laws against stupidity though.

Oliver Cromwell

2002-12-28 16:49 | User Profile

And if it takes laws "based" on putative health effects to keep you-all away from me, fine

First they came for the drinkers Then they came for the smokers Then they came for the fast food eaters Then they came for the opinionated, selfish ladies

And there was no one left to opose them.......

Leveller

2002-12-28 21:18 | User Profile

**First they came for the drinkers Then they came for the smokers Then they came for the fast food eaters Then they came for the opinionated, selfish ladies

And there was no one left to opose them.......**

Don't forget the cheese eaters. Eating decent (unpasteurized) Camembert or Brie is a federal crime, citizens.