A Book for New Yorkers: "Cigarettes Are Sublime" (Richard Klein)

I wonder whether Mayor Bloomberg and the other New York City politicos who voted the totalitarian and hypocritical law banning public smoking in the Big Apple had an occasion to peruse the 1993 book by professor Richard Klein entitled Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham: Duke University Press). (And, by the way, the book, full of anecdotes, also reminds the reader that the it was through the "beneficence'" of James B. Duke, a tobacco mogul, that Duke University was created.) Well, maybe they didn't need to read it, as the book is instead an eye-opener intended for the denizens at the receiving end of such "liberticide" laws... like the New York City Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment (Clash).

The book is by no means a protobacco manifesto, but a witty, dense, readable, and informed reflection by someone who wrote it while quitting smoking. And "sublime" in the title doesn't mean "grand," but is instead a philosophical concept Klein borrows from Kant who used it to describe the paradoxical "aesthetic satisfaction" that also involves a "negative experience" as well asa  "shock." Which means that cigarettes are bad and no one today in his (her) right mind would promote cigarettes given the overwhelming evidence of the harm of cigarettes on health.

But there are things that ought to give one pause in the current  "antitabagism" movement. Among the many points Klein makes is that, historically, antitabagism oftentimes coincided with puritanitanical (today, "healthist") pushes or repressive upsurges by tyrannical or totalitarian moods in societies.

Thus, for instance, in the America before the Civil War, the first public ban on public smoking was enacted in Boston after the successful campaign by the puritan Reverend George Task against the "demon plant." The antitobacco campaigners were also antifeminist who viewed smoking by women as an abomination...

Klein further shows that pro- and antitobacco moods have always operated like a pendulum in America:

"In 1920, just after World War I, when some antitobacco people bravely reemerged in Indiana to renew their campaign (the same groups whose triumphs in the 1890s had led twenty-six states to ban public smoking), they were indicted on charges of... Treason!"

That is, in times of wars and crises, American society is more tolerant towards smoking. Except this time around, when antitabagism is backed by a militant healthism.

But today the hypocrisy is glaringly evidenced by the following:

1) Tobacco growers are still subsidized by Congress;

2) Clean air standards have been weakened by the very same politicos who combat public smoking; and, what"s more

3) American cigarette companies are encouraged by the same politicians to dump billions of dollars worth of their products in the Third World.

So, Mayor Bloomberg is a jerk who takes New Yorkers as his suckers. Before he goes out swinging again smokers, he first ought to regulate, say, noxious carbon emissions issuing from cars and polluting industries.

Richard Klein needs to update and republish his terrific book in light of the tsunami of hypocrisy and civil rights infringements sweeping New York City these days.