Al Gore's tobacco road

Human Life Review, Fall 1997 by Murchison, William

Long before he was a presidential aspirant, second in command of the U.S. government, and dialer-in-chief for Democratic dollars-long before this, Al Gore was a brother. He had a sister, named Nancy.

At age 18, Nancy began to smoke cigarettes-a common enough pastime in those relatively innocent days; almost too common to excite notice. She ignored subsequent pointed warnings that tobacco smoke was slowly killing her and, at age 45, Nancy Gore Hunger died of lung cancer. Most Americans had not known of her life and death until August 28, 1996, when Al Gore, accepting his party's vice-presidential nomination, gave them international currency.

The still-grieving brother-increasingly a full partner in the let-it-allhang-out style of modern America-spoke of his sister's death in terms that awoke in listeners the pangs of anguished sympathy. In Nancy's last moments, Al related, he held her hand tenderly. Quietly she passed from this world to the next one.

Then the peroration, the thunderous coda, with rhetorical kettle drums banging in the background. The Vice President of the United States, next in line for the most powerful job in the world, pledged forevermore to"pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking."

No doubt it had to happen. Save the world from Communism and what's left for the world's mightiest secular enterprise-the United States government-to save us from? Cigarettes, anyone?

The semi-comical nature, in this solemn context, of a pledge to combat the Manufacturers and Purveyors of Tobacco sailed completely over the heads of Gore's audience, which was feeling keenly the pain he had wanted them to feel. As they used to say in show biz, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Better than a year later, the election over and done with, the music Gore sought self-consciously to make strikes false chords. Tears, emotion, a pledge to fight and contend with and conquer . . . cigarettes. Something is not quite right here. Suppose that Nessun Dorma, as its concluding stanzas arc heavenward, dissolved suddenly into "Luckenback, Texas"? There is something of the same falseness, the same impropriety, in Gore's attempt to enlist our society in a holy war against . . . cigarettes. Well, anyway, at a moment when deadlier, surer killers than cigarettes infest our culture.

Whether or not the Gore Anti-Smoking Pledge turns up in political anthologies, next page over from Daniel Webster's "Liberty and union, now and forever," it has important uses. It reminds us how deep is the chasm between . . let's call them the material and the spiritual understandings of human life. Most of all, it reminds us on what side of the chasm our culture, contrary to its founding traditions, and the development of those traditions, and their flowering and flourishing, presently squats.

On Al Gore's say-so, we are to protect our children from cigarettes. All right. For all that Gore himself, stumping in Tennessee, used to parade his devotion to the tobacco industry, who will argue against the prudential exercise of personal choices? Not I, brother. Asthmatic from age two, I was solemnly warned by doctors and parents alike never ever under any circumstances to smoke because if I did, I would die, see? This is the sort of thing that tends to impress even thick-skulled individualists, not naming any names. With asthma it is difficult enough at the best of times to breathe. I have never ever smoked.

Gore's rhetoric, nonetheless, conceals a modern irony: to wit, if you don't get born in the first place, you won't have to worry about lung cancer or emphysema carrying you off. What about abortion as a health menace? It strikes many, no doubt, that interventions which kill you on the front end are of more immediate concern than personal choices which may-or may not kill you four or five decades later.

So the Vice President (and his political superior, the President) would protect us from cigarette smoke. Okey-dokey. Would they likewise stand between unborn babies and paid abortionists, or for that matter women whose first maternal act is to locate the nearest dumpster? They wouldn't? They've nothing whatever to say in this line? On the contrary, they would defend in the last ditch every American woman's "right to choose"? You bet they would, as would their political party.

As this particular coin flies onto the political counter, there is the dull clunk of phoniness. What we learn is this: Our nation's top office-holders see no hearts to be wrung, no votes to be gathered, from pleas to spare unborn life. Life, yes-we're in favor of life. Don't smoke! (Doncha know how finicky abortion clinics can get about air quality?) Sell tobacco stocks! Get the polluters!

What a flip-flop in just three decades' time: a cultural reversal more dramatic than anyone living on the cusp of the revolution could possibly have foreseen. Remember when abortion was illegal and relatively few fretted about cigarettes? This was the old culture speaking. Its judgment concerning tobacco was, as circumstances have shown, hardly flawless but, then, the surgeon general's report on smoking was a new commodity-a matter that required some absorption. Turning against, or merely turning away from, an ancient practice like the smoking break comes less automatically, even with the light of new knowledge, than the anti-smoking lobby acknowledges.