GET YOUR FACE OUT OF MY CIGARETTE

AN OPEN LETTER FROM THE INVETERATE SMOKER 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.