<p>Poor smokers: they're the one dysfunctional minority nobody
cares about
</p>
<p>By Richard Corliss
</p>
<p> Time: the early 21st century. Scene: the First Church of Christ,
Smoker, the only place where nicotine addicts can find sanctuary
in a society that has declared their pastime illegal. Communicants
file up to the altar rail for a long drag on a cigarette--a precious, stale relic from the last carton of Marlboros sold
before the U.S. government banned smoking in 1997. The priest
blesses the faithful, they cough in response, and all exeunt
to today's hymn, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.
</p>
<p> It could come to this. Smokers may soon need to organize themselves
into an underground religion, elevating cigarettes to sacramental
status, as the Mexican Indians did to peyote. For what was once
a seductive pleasure is now an endangered cult, subject to demonization
by the fuming, nonsmoking majority. "Like wars of religion,"
writes Richard Klein in Cigarettes Are Sublime, "the campaign
against smoking lends itself to cruel fanaticism and self-righteous
indignation." People who would never dare chastise a co-worker
for his body odor or four-letter vocabulary will demand of a
smoker, "When you gonna give up that awful habit?" or just "Put
it out!"
</p>
<p> Out it goes and, with it, the notion of smoking as a soothing
arbiter of middle-class behavior. Like the loosening of a necktie,
it signaled a relaxation into informality at the end of a meal
or the start of a baseball game, before drinks or after sex.
Even for the solitary steam fitter or housewife, the act of
sending a geyser from mouth to ceiling could envelop the user
in a penumbra of calm thoughtfulness. It was an empyrean for
daydreams--the cloud of smoke our thoughts went up in.
</p>
<p> In popular art, smoking was always chic. Fred and Ginger, Bogie
and Bacall, every gangster, gunslinger and G.I. used cigarettes
to emblematize their suavity, maturity, grit. Kids loved the
lordly caterpillar in Disney's Alice in Wonderland, purring,
"Whoooo are yooooo?" while blowing his Alpha-Bits smoke rings.
For the college set, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward R. Murrow were
the patron saints of nicotine. F.D.R.'s cigarette, in a holder
at a jaunty angle, proved him both a dapper patrician and a
man of the people, while the can-do bosses of the public weal
sucked on fat cigars. Smoke-filled rooms gave us Social Security
and the Marshall Plan. In smoke-free rooms we get S&L fraud
and Whitewater.
</p>
<p> All that was long ago, before the '60s--from which all ominous
changes can be dated--rewrote the rules of American gesture.
Such previously banal signifiers as handshakes and haircuts,
comic books and pop music, became freighted with contentiousness.
Soon Steve Martin was introducing politically correct comedy
to the smoking debate. "Mind if I smoke?" he imagined someone
asking him, then replied, "No. Mind if I fart?" In the '80s,
even James Bond felt bad about smoking. Today the habit is excoriated--antitobacconists depict Joe Camel as a schoolyard drug pusher--and publicly survives only as a vestige of James Dean rebelliousness.
Denis Leary's very funny pro-smoking rants are essentially ironic;
taken seriously, they would come across as nostalgia for a life
misspent. In the recent film Reality Bites, the one hint of
Generation X bravado is that all the hipsters smoke and nobody
cares.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> Can we reach a compromise, O America of the New Prohibition?
I'll light up a little less; you lighten up a little more.
