The misanthrope's corner - smoking - Column

National Review, Oct 28, 1996 by Florence King

I'M writing this column on drugs. Just ask Bill Clinton, he'll tell you. I write everything on drugs -- books, articles, reviews, and thank-you notes to literary critics who praise the grace and clarity of the writing that issues from my perpetually drugged brain.

There is only one time, aside from sleeping and eating, when I don't use drugs. My grandmother always said, ''A lady never uses drugs on the street,'' and I never have. Otherwise I use one drug after another, because a delivery system tastes good like a delivery system should, and I have no intention of forgoing the pleasure.

Now I've done it. Every time I say something good about cigarettes I get bombarded with letters. The prize came from a couple who opened with ''Miss King'' -- no ''Dear'' -- and informed me that tobacco is ''more addictive than heroin.'' After lingering sensuously over such words as foul, stench, and disgusting, they promised to pray for me to quit, which they were sure I would try to do, since: ''Everyone we know who has ever smoked has tried to quit and almost all are ashamed and embarrassed to let it be known that they smoke.'' As fanatics always do, they enclosed clippings.

The virulence of the anti-smoking movement has always hinted at something bigger than smoking. When the first Surgeon General's warning came out in 1964 amid the marches and bombings of the early civil-rights movement, many people saw it as a calculated attempt to threaten the economies of tobacco-producing Southern states to force compliance with racial integration.

As things turned out, the South caved anyway, leaving a nascent anti-smoking movement by the wayside, waiting to be picked up, as Napoleon said of the French crown, on the tip of somebody's sword.

Subsequent events suggest that this is exactly what happened. Smoker-bashing has proved immeasurably useful to multiculturalists and diversity hustlers who understand the importance of a safety valve in campaigns of enforced tolerance. Taking their cue from American League baseball, they instituted the designated-pariah rule: If you intend to make everyone love everyone else whether they like it or not, be sure to give your useful idiots someone they can hate openly without fear of being called mean-spirited. Take care, however, that they don't catch on, or else they might start hating the people they really hate, and then all Hell will break loose.

The useful idiots haven't caught on -- useful idiots never do. They're so gullible they even believe all drugs are created equal, and support the Clinton Administration's plan to lump tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin together in pursuit of an outcome-based addiction that recognizes no difference between a glassy-eyed degenerate with arms like sieves and a tired waitress on a cigarette break.

No difference, that is, except one: it's okay to hate the waitress.

Redirected emotion -- what psychoanalysis calls ''displacement'' --is the crowning achievement of anti-tobacco propaganda. A majority of Americans are now in the grip of this disorder, providing a perfect out for a government helpless against hard drugs. We can't invade the inner cities without starting a race war as well as a mutiny in our multiracial army. Opening fire on the Mexican border would provoke Hispanics, declaring war on supplier nations would provoke Asians, but bankrupting North Carolina will play in every focus group in Peoria.

My letter writers always demand to know why I keep smoking when I know it's bad for me. Aside from the simple fact that I enjoy it, I have three reasons: misanthropic, nostalgic, and subconscious.

On the misanthropic front, smoking gives me a perfect excuse not to go anywhere. People used to invite me to things, but now I've got them trained to leave me alone, and I owe it all to second-hand smoke.

On the nostalgia front, my childhood inured me against dire warnings about fatal illness. My grandmother belonged to the last generation of women who washed and dressed their own dead, and it left them with a morbid streak. They all knew, or claimed to know, someone whose hair ''turned white overnight,'' or someone who ''turned to stone'' (''It starts in the feet and works up''), or someone who died when ''it'' hit their heart -- ''it'' being an air bubble from hiccoughing, or a tiny sliver broken off from a toothpick that somehow ''got into their bloodstream.''

I was supposed to die from reading: ink, which was poison, would get into a finger cut and thence into my bloodstream. But Granny's best warning, recited whenever she saw me scratching, concerned shingles: ''When the two ends of the rash meet around your waist, your heart stops.'' If you grow up hearing things like that, nothing Henry Waxman says could possibly make an impression.

MY subconscious reason can't very well be subconscious or I wouldn't know about it. I just call it subconscious to confuse the buzzword-addicted crowd who claim smokers are ''in denial.'' Nothing upsets them more than a smoker who knows exactly what he's doing, so I made sure I nailed down my subconscious reason.