A Dance with Death : THE FALLACY OF THE SMOKING BAN IS THAT IT’S A FUTILE ATTEMPT TO AVOID THE INEVITABLE
Why are we so preoccupied by the dangers of smoking? At a time when polls indicate an increasing number of Americans would legalize drugs, when every sort of behavior is justified on the after noon talk shows, smokers are outcasts. At a time when death may be the price to be paid for a careless night of sex, the hotel clerk will ask you if you want a nonsmoking room.
Earlier in this century, some Americans tried to keep other Americans from alcohol. Within the fierce Puritan moralism of the temperance movement, one, nonetheless, sensed a generous notion of commonwealth--fear that alcohol was bad for the entire society. Today’s civic morality is different to the degree that it seems justified by self-concern: “I don’t care what some jerk does to his own lungs. Just don’t expect me to breathe his secondhand smoke.”
As the quality of our lives seems to be diminishing, when there is no more clean air, clean air becomes a right. My space is my space. Americans end up shooting one another over parking spaces.
We used to speak of the inevitability of life and death. We used to bend to a sense of fate and construct our morality within an acceptance of life’s limits. Today, as the world around us seems so out of control, the sense of inevitability is replaced by notions of “choice.” We choose when to give birth, we choose when to die, precisely because we feel ourselves unable to control random death. Polls show growing support for Dr. Jack Ke- vorkian and “the right to suicide,” although smoking is not allowed inside our restaurants. Thank you for not smoking .
Not so many decades ago, ladies did not smoke in public. It took a great First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to break the taboo. At almost the same moment in American history, in “Now Voyager,” Paul Henreid lit a pair of cigarettes in his mouth, then handed one to Bette Davis.
One did not need a Freudian handbook to understand that cigarettes in the movies were all about sex. But if it is true that cigarettes are sexual, then what does today’s repugnance regarding cigarettes mean? Was the rise of the anti-smoking movement in the 1970s related to the increased use of the birth-control pill in those same years?
Certainly, smoking in America used to be associated with sociability--a cocktail glass, a cigarette--these were social tools. The cigarette was a means of loosening conversation, laughter. Now, we send the smoker outside while the rest of us talk.
The “smoke-filled room” is today associated by many Americans with corruption and deceit. But smoking used to be associated with intense human activity, parties and laughter, and also intense concentration and solitude. A smoker confides to me that his habit is a tool of concentration, a means of discipline. (“I light a cigarette before making a phone call.”) Thus was Paul Henreid related to the solitary Marlboro Man. The cigarette was both urbane and Western.
Today, smoking is only a private pleasure. Another smoker confesses: “So many awful behaviors my cigarette keeps under control. Smoking is such a privacy. A lovely deception. It steadies my hand. Too bad it will probably kill me.”
Even as American pop culture moves into parts of the world where it is regarded as morally contaminating, Americans are also internationally famous for a preoccupation with health. For decades, Americans have been famous for our obsession.
No more so than in California. No more so than now. In California, people do not die. We pass away. We do not grow old--we get plastic surgery. California’s contribution to the culinary arts is haute hygiene.
But I am beginning to think that the old cliche about the American fear of death needs to be readjusted. In 1994, I do not think that Americans look too little at death. Rather, I think we are overwhelmed by death, death everywhere around us.
Children are gunning each other down on the playground. Women are being snatched from shopping-mall parking lots and murdered. There is carnage--three people dead--on the San Diego Freeway this morning.
Earlier in the century, Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley wrote satirically of the Californian evasion of death. They were British and mocked our evasion for being characteristically American. But, as a boy, I was in love with California precisely because it refused to acknowledge death. I was happy that California was so distant from the morbidity of Mexico. The ancient sadness of my family’s mournful Catholic statues, the darkness that rang in Mexican laughter.
Now, Los Angeles seems a city of death, so different from the city I used to love. And life has become a burden, a sorrow. Yet, California is not becoming infused with a sense of Catholic sadness as much as with a pagan stoicism.
In the bookstores today, you can find best sellers about a happier afterlife. (Your lover is waiting for you on the other side of death’s divide.)
Also near the top of the best-seller list is a book called “How We Die.” The ancient conversation human beings have with God begins with the question “Why do we live only to die?” But in 1994, we seek consolation in another question. Not “why” but “how.” We do not talk to God anymore. Today, all we know is the body--how it works and, finally, stops. We are not troubled by mystery; we seek to control. We are interested in Oprah Winfrey’s new diet book, which promises us french fries without calories.
Health replaces holiness in today’s America. It is not possible to turn on the evening news without encountering a resident TV physician or “health reporter.” And the news is dire: Beware movie-theater popcorn. There is danger within the shrouded cube of margarine.
A man I know who was, two years ago, a drug addict is now “clean.” He works as a personal trainer. He has a heroic body; he can tell you what to eat and not to eat; he takes enemas weekly; he doesn’t smoke. He drinks bottle after bottle of mineral water.
And wasn’t that a lovely joke in “The Player,” Robert Altman’s movie satire on Hollywood? How Altman’s vision of Hollywood was of a corrupt gang of agents and producers and writers. Our hero, who was also a murderer, was obsessed by water, imported water. Water from some clean locale like Switzerland. Water instead of food. Water instead of sacramental confession.
In an America that consumes water, is consumed by the need for cleansing, it is not odd that so much attention is given to the dangers of smoking. Oh, do not misunderstand. I am no apologist for the R.J. Reynolds Company. I hate the stench of old smoke on my sofa, on hair, on clothes, on lips. I wish the person I love most in the world would quit smoking.
But I also understand when another friend remembers her grandfather dying of emphysema. “God, how he wanted a cigarette--even on his last day.” The old man, wheezing, begged for a smoke. But no one would oblige, except his granddaughter. She took the old man’s $5 and went to the store and bought him a pack.
“Give a rat enough of anything, and the rat’s going to die,” says one smoker. Sometimes, I think the reason I like being with smokers, enjoy their throaty laugh, their Dorothy Parker lack of sentimentality, is they are the only ones prepared to tell the truth about the inevitability of death and life in America.
