The COVID pandemic ignited in me an admiration of the smoker of cigarettes. Cigarette smoking seems to me to be the product of a bygone culture that placed a premium on style and taste, over safety. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that smoking’s popularity rose and fell in tandem with the rise and fall of the great American styles of architecture, art, music, and automobiles. The sterile Puritan animals that manifested out of the shadows during the Great Panic of 2020 scorned smokers, but it felt refreshing to see the random stranger light up on the street. It was as if I’d caught a glimpse of an endangered species, almost poached to extinction. The irony is that in our age of spinster puritanism, and amid our war on smoking, our society continues to reach new heights in drug addiction, overdose deaths, alcoholism, STD infections, obesity, et cetera. Busybody-ism, a degenerative psychological disease, is to blame, and busybodies always seek to stamp out anything and everything beautiful. The war on smoking has nothing to do with health, but with aesthetics. A resentful culture cannot tolerate the person who smokes, just as they cannot tolerate the unmasked or the unwoke. The cigarette is a symbol of independence, individualism, a rejection of organized belief systems, a rejection of Puritan witch-hunting. Health was never the concern of the anti-cigarette crusaders, but merely used as a strategy to achieve their aim. As their sterile, “woke” religion expands, so will the list of verboten personal activities.
Tour de France competitors smoking cigarettes mid-race, 1927 pic.twitter.com/gdLi3A77vj
— Cigarette Aesthetica (@CigsMake) February 24, 2023
