It's 1964. The US Surgeon General's report into smoking came out and shockingly announced that smoking was now officially bad for you. Somehow in the preceding millennia of tobacco smoking, human beings failed to realise that sucking a byproduct of fire into your lungs would not have pleasant results.
Nonetheless, Luther Leonidas Terry, the Surgeon General at that time, and his band of merry medical aficionados made it a fact and, ever since, smoking has become an increasingly maligned pastime. Perhaps the stigma is justified, especially considering the effects of second hand smoke. I dunno, I'm not into science. But today you can't smoke in pubs, or at work, or in a lecture (much to my dismay), or at the pool, or at the hospital. And so few people smoke that you actually have to make an effort to inhale lots of second hand smoke. So why is it that while I'm legally walking down the street with a smoke hanging out my mouth, some people look at me like I'm the demon spawn of Satan and that crazy bitch from Fatal Attraction? Why do they couple this judgemental gaze with coughs larger and falser than Jenna Jameson's tits? Ol' Luther Leonidas said that “smoking is bad”, not “smokers are bad people”. And don't tell me that the spilt-second's worth of second hand smoke that wafts, distilled by air, in your general direction is enough to damage your health.
I call these folk, “Smoke Nazis”, and they are probably the largest (and possibly most understandable) sub-sector of the Health Nazi community of the modern world. Let me remind you Smoke Nazis that no-one ever beat their wife to death under the influence of a pack of smokes, and that with the extra taxes we pay on a pack we not only more than pay for all anti-smoking campaigns but also more than pay for our own admissions to hospital for lung cancer or whatnot. Do you know what that means? That means that smokers are helping keep this nation in a state of reasonable health, or at least alive. All the while we laugh at the morbidly obese antics of that new fat chick on Glee, the drunken tomfoolery of the Hoff and his buddy the cheeseburger, and count down the days until Charlie Sheen's urine finally turns into pure liquid crack. We do this with a detached and often pisstaking attitude but the revelation Miley Cyrus smokes? Scandal! Now I'm not saying smoking is inherently good, I am struggling to quit a thirty-a-day habit myself, but can you Smoke Nazis at least trade your demonisation for the polite amusement you reserve for drunken girl's boobs falling out of their tops? That's all I ask, treat us like drunk girl boobs.
Besides, you know who was the original Smoke Nazi? The first public figure to demonise smoking? Hitler. So there.
Want to get your angry voice heard? Write us a 500 word diatribe on whatever grinds your gears, and it could be featured on this page. Send it to us at critic@critic.co.nz by 4pm Wednesday.
Smoke Nazis
