Smoked Out
This weekend,, we went to see the newborn daughter (they’re all daughters these days…) of a couple of friends. In good Seattle style, there was a political facet to this otherwise-routine ritual. For the privilege of holding the baby, the parents required visitors to sign a petition that is circulating to put a measure on the ballot to ban smoking in public places in Washington state.
Now I don’t smoke, and I’ve been at the bedside of beloved relatives dying of lung cancer, so I have no special affection for the habit. I go out fairly often, and sometimes my drinking holes-of-choice are smoky enough that I can still smell it on my hair and clothes the next day, which pleases neither me nor anyone close enough to me to share the experience. I generally refuse to eat in restaurants where they don’t have a non-smoking section, and think it is barbaric to smoke in the presence of decent food.
But I really, really don’t like this petition.
To me, the anti-smoking movement symbolizes everything wrong with the American cultural left. There are very good public health and economic reasons to discourage smoking and there is an airtight argument, so to speak, about why service workers in the food industry should not be exposed to cigarette smoke as a workplace safety issue. But these are rarely the reasons the most passionate anti-smokers give for their activism on the issue.
Most of them just don’t like cigarettes. They don’t like the smell, they don’t like tobacco companies, and, at base, they don’t like the kind of people who smoke. Smoking is synonymous with habitual stupidity, moral cowardice (for being unable to quit despite all the reasons to), and lack of consideration. Forcing smokers into a position of public shame and scorn validates the moral superiority of the non-smoker. It gets revenge for all those years that smoking was allowed everywhere – in elevators and airplanes, not to mention restaurants and offices – and non-smokers were looked upon with a mixture of pity and contempt. It gives society’s blessing to self-discipline, clean living, and beyond-the-norm health consciousness (the friends who are circulating this petition are also vegetarians), condemning brutish smokers to stand outside on the street.
The fact is, in America, smoking cigarettes is increasingly a habit of the lower economic classes. Many upper middle-class urban liberals don’t personally know anyone who smokes, with the possible exception of unreconstructed radicals and artists they knew in college or foreigners. At the baby gathering this weekend, the fact that a mutual friend’s girlfriend was “a smoker” was uttered in quizzical and disapproving tones. It’s also true that the aversion of many liberal anti-smokers to butts and pipes ends with tobacco products. These facts often create a kind of background noise of cognitive dissonance for strident liberal anti-smokers, and the most common strategy is to simply ignore the uncomfortable inconsistencies and fall back on all the Very Good Reasons that cigarettes should be banished, if not banned outright.
As I said, I am sympathetic to all of this. If I don’t want to be around smoke, I go to places that elect to not offer a smoking area indoors. I am not above asking a smoker to blow their smoke the other direction if it’s bothering me, and find that most smokers are extremely considerate if given consideration themselves. And I deeply resent – as only someone who was stuck in the smoking section of a 727 on an Istanbul to London flight can – not having the option of fresh air in a confined location.
But I am also profoundly uncomfortable imposing my tastes and values on others. The anti-smoking movement has gone beyond giving non-smokers a choice. It has become a crusade against the whole set of class values and aesthetics of smokers, and it’s tinged the same kind of puritanical resentment that liberals fiercely reject when it comes to issues that don’t coincide with their preferred view of the world. It gives the right wing – especially its most obnoxious fratboy elements – a tailor-made caricature of the self-righteous liberal hypocrite, the urban elite looking down on the working stiff just trying to enjoy a simple pleasure. It reinforces the cultural logic of prohibition that has done and continues to do so much needless damage to our society and our criminal justice system when applied to other kinds of substances. And I really, really hate the ballot initiative process, which has been abused so many ways already, here being used to further pit citizens against each other on lifestyle issues.
It’s not like we’re talking about encroaching fascism here. I have been to New York since the smoking ban in bars and don’t find the atmosphere oppressive. Smokers there have adapted in a number of ways, and the small groups that form out on the sidewalks present better social opportunities in many ways than the scene inside the bar. Hell, I know smokers who support the ban and would sign the petition, except for the fact that they’re foreign-born and not citizens!
So in the end, I buckled and signed the damned thing. How could I not? The baby was so cute!
8:43:54 AM 
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