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GET
YOUR FACE OUT OF MY CIGARETTE
An Open Letter 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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