I'm lighting up to fight city's anti-smoking
gestapo
ROSIE
DIMANNO
It
was only whilst reading the Star's editorial page on the
weekend — a grim exercise but good for the odd cackle — that I
learned this is National Non-Smoking Week.
That merits firing up a dart right there. (By which we
mean "dart'' as synonym for cigarette, and not dart as
in antonym of the editorial page laurel, which is what
this newspaper gives every cockamamie scheme designed to
annihilate smokers from the face of the earth.)
It would be mean of me to point out that even some of
the most zealous non-smoking advocates around this place, on
those occasions when they've temporarily removed the cork from
their arses — say, at a staff Christmas party or when they've
otherwise plunged into the deep end of the bar, all sociable
and very nearly likeable — suddenly forget that they're
non-smokers and come around mooching for cigarettes. I am
always happy to oblige because I encourage vice in all.
And smoking, while not technically illegal — that is to
say, sale and possession of the product is not illegal (yet) —
is most definitely a vice in Western society, barely less
objectionable than pederasty or mainlining heroin at one's
primary workstation, hence the crunching vise of
ever-more invasive and radical anti-smoking diktats, bylaws
and un-laws inflicted on a huge puffing minority by a bossy
bunch of nico-Nazis and health fascists who happen to have the
ear of government. Indeed, increasingly, they are the
government, at its most officious, arbitrary and
zero-tolerance mantra worst.
Spending so much time away from Toronto in recent
years, often in places most would consider uncivilized
hellholes (and they smoke there too! the barbarians), I'd lost
track of the city's nincompoop smoking bylaws and lost touch
with the grumpy tobacco wars. Perhaps part of me was hoping
this anti-smoking hysteria had all been a '90s fad, like
colonics and wearing underwear as outerwear. But surely, given
the state of the globe in this embryonic millennium, there
were more pressing problems than a non-smoker getting a whiff
of tobacco fume up his nose in a bingo parlour.
Silly girl.
It seems smokers are the suicide bombers of North
America in spreading public endangerment — minus the moral
relativism invested upon terrorists by the pseudo-intellectual
left, a group that once smoked rather grandly and with
photogenic panache. I think I fell out of love with the left
when it stopped smoking, drinking and writing feverish
manifestos, more latterly writing, say, scolding Star
editorials.
But I digress.
Actually, I just digressed all the way to the variety
store across the street, to buy another pack of smokes. Also,
to pick up a copy of the new Vanity Fair, so I could enjoy a
delightful rant by the mischievous Christopher Hitchens,
writing about his recent one-man crime spree in New York City.
Undertaken as a whimsical protest against the new
all-encompassing anti-smoking ordinance imposed at the behest
of un-fun Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Hitchens spent a day
gleefully breaking a clutch of absurd bylaws — sitting on an
upended milk crate, pausing to adjust his shoe on a subway
step, riding a bicycle without keeping his foot on the pedal
at all times and, of course, smoking in a bar and at a
restaurant table.
There are more
pressing problems in the world than protecting
non-smokers from a whiff of tobacco fume
| The Big Apple, as I
discovered for myself during a recent sojourn there, has gone
all bureaucratic goofy in the matter of public smoking, to the
extent that it's now even illegal to have an ashtray on the
premises or to smoke outside a bar/restaurant, should the
smoker just happen to be standing beneath an awning. I
probably shouldn't even mention that; it might just give
Toronto's health vigilantes ideas, so distressed have they
become at how other municipalities have overtaken The Big
Smoke in passing draconian anti-smoking fiats.
New York, writes Hitchens, is now "the domain of the
mediocre bureaucrat, of the inspector with too much time on
his hands, of the anal-retentive cop with his nose in a rule
book, of the snitch willing to drop a dime on a harmless
fellow citizen, and of a mayor who is that most pathetic and
annoying figure — the micro-megalomaniac.''
I never thought New Yorkers, with their reputation for
"pugnacious independence,'' would roll over so meekly.
Although I do admire the style of an upscale restaurant that
has made available mink wraps for its female clientele
stepping out for a between-courses smoke.
I never thought Edmonton, also pugnaciously
independent, would cave so easily either. But I spent a month
there a week ago and was stunned to see how anti-smoking
ordinances have been likewise imposed on that city, although
one can still — for the time being — light up in bars.
Alas, this is the new Reformation. Just as Martin
Luther once tacked 95 theses against the traffic of papal
indulgences on the northern door of a Wittenberg church —
thereby setting off a movement that mutated into a tyranny of
dreadful intolerance, having very little to do with justice
and reform as originally envisaged — the new anti-smoking
bulls are now affixed at the portals to bars and restaurants,
soon to be followed hereabouts by bowling alleys and bingo
parlours and pool halls. As if.
In June, Toronto bars become no-go smoking zones. And,
in a colossal betrayal all too typical of their deceitful
kind, the very same politicians who bartered separate smoking
rooms out of publicans and restaurateurs a couple of years ago
— at no small cost for the nearly 200 owners in Toronto who
did so — are now poised to unilaterally scuttle the compromise
agreement. Those specially ventilated rooms could be illegal
within a year. Why? Because the smoking brown shirts say so.
Just as they've fashioned junk science out of second-hand
smoking research. You might recall how the World Health
Organization tried to suppress the results of its own 10-year
study, which concluded no significant health risks could be
attributed to exposure to second-hand smoke. No mention of
that in those fear-mongering public health posters around
town.
Some of us — a group that includes non-smokers appalled
by the erosion of individual freedoms and those, like me, who
are primarily situational smokers — will continue to fight the
abuse of power. Personally, I'm not the least bit cowed by the
looming anti-smoking injunctions. Breaking petty laws appeals
to the anarchist and scofflaw in me. Indeed, if I'd ever
considered quitting smoking, I can't possibly do so now.
And the smoke gestapo can suck on this.
Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday,
Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. E-mail: dimanno@hotstar.net
Additional
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