Tags
Banquo, Cancer, Cigarette, Death, England, Global Warming, Greens, Lucky Strike, Morality, Mortality, Nanny State, Opinion, Politics, Puritans, Satire, Smoking
My favourite cigarette is Lucky Strike, which is as sweet as sleep and as kitsch as a cowboy. I bought a packet the other day, however, and there was a dead body on the back. I tried to remove the photograph of the dead man from the packet – presuming that it was some sort of collector’s card – but it transpired that the corpse cannot be removed without destroying the packet. The dead man lies on a tray in a morgue, a sky blue towel over his eyes. Death has accentuated his fleshiness, so that he looks as if he was painted by Lucian Freud. The photograph vaguely reminded me of those medieval cathedral carvings in which a pair of beautiful young lovers are rotated to reveal two grinning skeletons. I half feared that the photograph was some sort of time-lapse hologram, so that the more cigarettes I smoked the further the body in the photograph would decompose.
My friend showed me the same photograph on her sleeve of Golden Virginia, which annoyed me because I had presumed that the corpse on my packet had died from specifically smoking Lucky Strikes. To be fair to the individual cigarette brands, each should cite the corpse of somebody who had died from smoking that particular cigarette. It had never occurred to me that the man in the photograph may merely be an actor with his eyes shut, rather than an actual corpse. The unsteady emotional nastiness of modern anti-smoking propaganda had led me to unthinkingly assume that the corpse was real – that the propagandists had identified somebody dying of lung cancer and then bullied him into consenting to be snapped after his death.
Perhaps the anti-smoking propagandists had hoped that I would take one look at the corpse, drop the packet, and then run away screaming. Lucky Strike’s merry promises about its “well-rounded, roasted aroma” are rather contested by the corpse’s epigraph that “Smokers Die Younger,”; like the husband who shows off at a dinner party being devastatingly contradicted by his henpecking wife; or, indeed, like Banquo shaking his gory locks over dinner in Shakespeare’s finest comic scene. Yet one distrusts the anti-smoking brigade – just as one is sceptical of the present fuss about global warming, or of those who prescribe celibacy and temperance for teenagers – because they reiterate the quintessentially English horror of the consequences of pleasure.
Oliver Cromwell and his party-pooping Puritans banned Christmas because of the terrible duty that festive pleasures may have tolled upon English souls, and ever since the English have derived weird comforts from self-denial, rationing, and abstinence. England is lucky to have discovered global warming and the race to obsessively reduce carbon emissions, else its middle classes would probably have degenerated into wearing hair shirts, flagellating themselves, and dancing around with stones in their shoes. Other people and nations tend to address global warming with practical means such as investing in technology and infrastructure, rather than with the creepy, emotional insistence upon “cutting back” and “travelling less” articulated by the English. The same applies to smoking, incidentally, and I have encountered many Spanish kids who only smoke socially, or casually, or who do not know whether or not they smoke, because for them the very act of smoking is not a declaration of independence from the nannying of amassed hegemonic forces.
Tychy advocates some subtle changes in public policy. One should conclude the logic of the anti-smoking propagandists by reminding everybody, rather than merely smokers alone, of the consequences of their pleasures. Chocolate bars should be adorned with images of fat people struggling to climb stairs; bottles of cider should display photographs of puddles of vomit; and cartons of Soya milk and packets of Quorn should depict pallid underweight specimens expiring from their lack of energy. And every time that somebody who gives up smoking dies prematurely – say in a car accident – then a representative from the N.H.S. should publicly apologise at the dead man’s funeral for all of the pleasure that they had unnecessarily forsaken.
