Subject: Get Your Face Out of My Cigarette |
Author:
Robert Levin
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Date Posted: 23:24:06 12/27/02 Fri
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 shit 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.
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