LOVE, HATE, CIGARETTE

A wrapping of tobacco lit and sucked: the common cigarette. It’s been glamorized and demonized, thrown through the rigors of an America always looking over its shoulder—Europe’s doing it, why can’t we? Because we know better, right? It’s a coffin nail, a cancer stick, a fag of tar and rat poison that is designed to invade soft, pink, vulnerable lungs.

Recently, well-made advertisements exhort the Truth, confronting smokers and cigarette makers with body bags to halt the tide of nicotine addiction that, if you believe the hype, is threatening to kill us all. Meanwhile, cigarette makers are countering with a milder, low-tar version of anti-smoking propaganda, aimed at youth and half-heartedly encouraging dialogue between parents (their customers) and soft, pink, vulnerable teens. Propaganda Menthol: just as harshly condescending, but with a pleasant mint aftertaste. Then there’s the Surgeon General, that superhero in the distance who steps in squarely at every opportunity to say, with a booming All-American voice, why doctors think inhaling a burning substance is bad for you. Nice guy, but not nearly as interesting as the villain he’s thwarting. Couldn’t “smoking may cause emphysema” be jazzed up a bit? “Smoking causes tracheotomy holes” is at least more vivid, and just as medically accurate.

But enough about the crusaders. This isn’t about the politics, it’s about the cigarettes, those little skinny white guys we crush to cripples on the sidewalks of America. Here’s the real Truth: we need cigarettes. I mean the collective ‘we’ ... nobody disputes smoking is an unhealthy habit. No, we need smokers in general, just out there, polluting our air with second-hand death and decreasing the productivity of our economy one five-minute break at a time.

Why? Mortality, humility, and an all-too-missed reminder of death and danger. Not to sound too Wordsworth here, but this Man vs. Nature game is starting to look like the yearly CU vs. Nebraska slaughter. And, in the scope of a planetary lifespan, we’re only in the first quarter here. Fire was the gods’ great gift to man, an advantage for us hairless apelings to use against the harsh outdoor lives we endured until one dude figured out masonry and another got that whole farming thing down. Funny enough, fire is an uncontrollable force, tamed like a wolf hybrid—you can keep it in the house, but the mailman better not let down his guard. It was a double-crossing gift, wiping out the very shelters constructed to make use of its warmth. And, as the first genius to smoke leaves figured out, it was designed for external use only.

The fact that Nature came up with plants begging to be lit on fire and consumed is only, well, natural. And fair. After we slash and burn rainforests, immolate massive resources of coal and gas, dirty the atmosphere with toxic pollutants, and take out rival nations with flying bombs of atomic destruction, shouldn’t we expect at least a little coy retaliation by the planet? It’s like deer evolving blow darts in their antlers—hunters might complain, but the rest of us would gladly accept the new rules of the game. It’s our obligation, as an intelligent species organized socially around the principles of freedom and justice, to inhale the black cancerous ash of a plant we cultivate.

Why, in a world that so damaged by toxic man-made pollutants in the air, in the ground, and in the sea, are we spending and re-spending billions of dollars on smoking? Is this really the number one health hazard to the human species? Or, is it just a gross habit that some people can’t shake, some people enjoy, and some sanctimonious people would like to see wiped off the face of the planet. It’s so easy to blame cigarettes for our decreasing health. It’s hard to analyze the damage we’ve done to the air and soil and water we depend on for life. Want to educate children on health? Stop hammering them with the obvious (really, who doesn’t intuitively know smoking hurts your lungs?) and start teaching them about the real threats to our existence.

Of course, the Truth is those threats could be easily eliminated if we just got rid of humans altogether. So smoke up. Slip the body bags into the saddle and let them ride off into the sunset. It’s time to use the gift of fire the way we’ve earned it. We need smokers ...polluting our air with second-hand death and decreasing the productivity of our economy one five-minute break at a time.