The useful idiots haven't caught on -- useful idiots never do. They're so gullible they even believe all drugs are created equal, and support the Clinton Administration's plan to lump tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin together in pursuit of an outcome-based addiction that recognizes no difference between a glassy-eyed degenerate with arms like sieves and a tired waitress on a cigarette break.
No difference, that is, except one: it's okay to hate the waitress.
Redirected emotion -- what psychoanalysis calls ''displacement'' --is the crowning achievement of anti-tobacco propaganda. A majority of Americans are now in the grip of this disorder, providing a perfect out for a government helpless against hard drugs. We can't invade the inner cities without starting a race war as well as a mutiny in our multiracial army. Opening fire on the Mexican border would provoke Hispanics, declaring war on supplier nations would provoke Asians, but bankrupting North Carolina will play in every focus group in Peoria.
My letter writers always demand to know why I keep smoking when I know it's bad for me. Aside from the simple fact that I enjoy it, I have three reasons: misanthropic, nostalgic, and subconscious.
On the misanthropic front, smoking gives me a perfect excuse not to go anywhere. People used to invite me to things, but now I've got them trained to leave me alone, and I owe it all to second-hand smoke.
On the nostalgia front, my childhood inured me against dire warnings about fatal illness. My grandmother belonged to the last generation of women who washed and dressed their own dead, and it left them with a morbid streak. They all knew, or claimed to know, someone whose hair ''turned white overnight,'' or someone who ''turned to stone'' (''It starts in the feet and works up''), or someone who died when ''it'' hit their heart -- ''it'' being an air bubble from hiccoughing, or a tiny sliver broken off from a toothpick that somehow ''got into their bloodstream.''
I was supposed to die from reading: ink, which was poison, would get into a finger cut and thence into my bloodstream. But Granny's best warning, recited whenever she saw me scratching, concerned shingles: ''When the two ends of the rash meet around your waist, your heart stops.'' If you grow up hearing things like that, nothing Henry Waxman says could possibly make an impression.
MY subconscious reason can't very well be subconscious or I wouldn't know about it. I just call it subconscious to confuse the buzzword-addicted crowd who claim smokers are ''in denial.'' Nothing upsets them more than a smoker who knows exactly what he's doing, so I made sure I nailed down my subconscious reason.
It's this: I think suicide qua suicide is weak and shameful, but maybe, if I just keep smoking, I can hasten my exit from this Walpurgisnacht called America and escape the mephitic cultural collapse that Nice-Nelly conservatism is powerless to stop.
This is probably wishful thinking in view of my family's medical history, but it points up another benefit of cigarettes we no longer hear about: consolation. Even the word is gone from the language now, but it was what came through in World War II newsreels showing weary soldiers and refugees lighting up. In their most despairing moments a cigarette was all they had, and increasingly I feel the same way.
Good article. Thanks.
Florence is a very witty woman. I hope she lives longer than my sister, also named Florence, who started smoking at age sixteen and did two packs a day for almost forty years. She died at age 54.