RDH - Cigarettes: Today's Stigma, Yesterday's Demonstration of Man's Power, Alone Among the Animals, to Control Fire

Cigarettes: Today’s Stigma, Yesterday’s Demonstration of Man’s Power, Alone Among the Animals, to Control Fire

January 29, 2007

The examples speak for themselves: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in all their movies together. Marlene Dietrich. Clark Gable. Not to mention Sam Spade and the middle- and lower-middle-class characters peopling the stories of Raymond Carver. It's abundantly clear that cigarettes, under heavy fire today, were once magnificent props in the lives of fascinating and mysterious people.

This is, as you may have had the opportunity to notice, one of my shorter essays. I have a lot of laundry to fold this afternoon, among other responsibilities. Remember that great story that was in the American secondary-school curriculum during the 1970s and part of the 1980s, called "I Stand Here Ironing"? That's me.

Speaking of Raymond Carver, he's perhaps the last of the great cigarette smokers. He died of lung cancer in 1988, at 50, a factor that may have contributed, together with his alcoholism and tendency toward short fiction and poetry, to his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recall that F. Scott Fitzgerald died from cigarette-related heart disease at an even younger age, 44, and that his legend is far greater. (The latter was also more of an alcoholic than the former; moreover, Fitzgerald never joined Alcoholics Anonymous, whereas Carver did, a factor that diminishes Carver's greatness—not necessarily as a human being, but certainly as a writer of the old school.)

If you need further proof, beyond the more obviously superior qualities of some of the above-mentioned people, remember also that people like Humphrey Bogart didn't even necessarily feel the need to attenuate their habit through the use of filtered cigarettes. When Bogart tapped his cigarette on his wristwatch, he wasn't doing what modern-day smokers might try to rationalize by the dubious claim that they are "packing" the leaves for a smoother burn; rather, he was attempting to reduce, among other probable irritations or annoyances, the likelihood of ending up with an unsightly tobacco flake between two front teeth.

More evidence. During the 1930s, food became harder to come by, and this is where tobacco came into its own. As people have understood for centuries, smoking suppresses the appetite. An analysis of this process is beyond the scope of the present forum, but the latest research supports the anecdotal evidence.* In any case, if you have time, be sure to read George Orwell's first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London (New York and London, 1933), in which this phenomenon is described in marvelous detail.

Now, of course, cigarettes are not only harmful but indicative of either (a) low social status, (b) borderline mental illness, or (c) a tendency toward youthful posing. Examples of phenomenon a can be observed on the outskirts of hospitals and outside office buildings in the United States and in bad neighborhoods throughout the world. Examples of the second phenomenon include the multimillionaire video game designer Will Wright and a tiny minority of CEOs and sales representatives. For examples of tendency c, visit the arts quad of any major college campus.

So, as the United States and other hypercivilized nations become more and more aggressively litigious (witness, for example, the disappearance of diving boards and deep ends from most hotel swimming pools in the United States during the last thirty years), cigarettes—which are, after all, dangerous to smokers and those in their immediate vicinity—have been banished from more and more places and eliminated from more and more lives. Even the mere reenactment of the halcyon days of smoking has been threatened, as smoking on stage has been banished in city after city across what was once a fascinating and adventure-filled landscape.

*Note that the more recent—and alarming—trend toward overweight smokers, especially in the United States, is indicative of another phenomenon: when cheap food is available twenty-four hours a day in heretofore unimaginable quantities, those who would allow themselves to indulge in cigarettes in an antismoking culture are increasingly the same people who overindulge period.