My new favorite person: Christopher Hitchens

[luckyjimm]

Is the smoking ban a good idea? - No

If I had wanted an encapsulating anecdote for my argument, it would have been provided by our glorious secretary of state for health, Patricia Hewitt, who commented on recent events in Iran: "It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people." Yes, I think that just about expresses the anti-tobacco mentality. It is all-enveloping and all-inclusive, utterly patronising and completely, laughably literal-minded. It is the same solemn certitude that, in the United States recently, airbrushed Franklin Roosevelt's cigarette-holder from the street-signs in his home town, and forbade a condemned murderer in Florida his request for a last cigarette on the grounds - perfectly logical, really - that death row was an absolutely non-smoking facility.

It seems almost quaint to recall the long opposing tradition, whereby British stoicism and endurance - whether it involved PoWs or men in the trenches, or people on long night-shifts or arduous stints at the coalface - were almost exemplified by the consoling [censored] or baccy or snout. Don't you know this stuff is really bad for you, and even for those around you? Are you aware, my good man, that smoking can shorten your life? I trust you appreciate, madam, that inhaling during pregnancy may affect your unborn child? Have you not perused the studies, which conclusively show that "passive smoking" can have deleterious effects on perfect strangers?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do know all this, or at any rate am perfectly prepared to act as if it were all true. That is why I do not object to smoking being banned on aeroplanes, in hospitals or in offices. But it has been a long time since any non-smoker has been forced to breathe the same air as a smoker. The upcoming general ban - Ms Hewitt's triumphant legislative monument - crosses a completely different line. It is no longer "about" the protection of non-smokers. It is "about" state-enforced behaviour-modification. Another and more old-fashioned name for it is prohibition.

Question: is a bar or pub or restaurant "a workplace". Yes it is, in a way, obviously, because people have jobs there. But is this not a slightly reductionist definition of a place of hospitality? You as a customer or patron do not have quite the same relationship to the management as you do, say, to those from whom you buy your groceries. When you enter your local, you are a guest and the proprietor is the host. Much depends on an atmosphere of mutual cordiality. Well, then, if the owner likes his pipe and you enjoy the odd cigarette or cigar, why should anyone else be involved in the relationship? Those who do not want to be around any smoke have plenty of places of their own to which to resort, where the rules are different.

Ah, but what about the staff? They have to put up with what you and your host are puffing, don't they? Surely this is an issue of workers' rights? But that is true only if you assume that a person seeking a job as a waitress or barman, and allergic to smoke, can only find a job in a smoker's paradise. How likely, really, is that? If places of hospitality were plainly demarcated as "smokers welcome" or "no smoking", it is hard to imagine that all involved would not be able to find their way, unaided by the government, to the place that suited them best. Isn't it a bit boring to have to point this out?

Of course it is boring. It is supposed to be boring! The reason for the easy victory of people such as Hewitt (who I had pegged for a little authoritarian frump even when she ran the old National Council for Civil Liberties) is that they do not feel boredom at all. For them, attending a committee meeting that will find ways of closing the last loophole and abolishing the last exemption or anomaly is an experience akin to the sensual. Soon, soon, they moan softly to themselves, the rules will be absolutely the same for everybody. No exceptions. At long last - zero tolerance!

Just ponder the implications of those last two words for a second. They say, without any ambiguity, that tolerance is to be despised. Forget all the usual babble about "inclusiveness" and "diversity". If you want to toddle round to the Rat and Goldfish and have a smoke and a drink while you mutter over the newspaper, you can forget it. There are people who have taken you into account, and weighed and measured your situation, and who have other plans for you. What a pity that you had better things to do than attend that committee meeting where your private pleasures came under scrutiny. Bet you wish you weren't so easily bored.

So this is another of those battles, not just between the literal-minded and the broad-minded, but between the quantifiable and the unquantifiable. There are those who think that everything can be accounted for and adjudicated, and those who do not. Somebody once wrote that the gods do not subtract, from the span of a man's life, the hours spent in fishing. For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time. (The same goes for the life of those who delight the chivvying of the fox, and who try to make an antic sport out of the sordid necessity to cull rural predators one way or another.) But I would prefer not to disturb something for which I have no sympathy and no comprehension, and I have no very strong compulsion to tell people who do not threaten me what they may not do. For all I know, these fatuous recreations may hold a magic key of consolation to others. I am told - persuasively enough - that some years have already been subtracted from my own span by the smoking habit. That's tough. But as Calverly put it in his Ode To Tobacco: "I have a liking old,/ For thee, thou manifold/ Stories I know, are told/ Not to thy credit."

There have been moments of reverie, wreathed in smoke and alone with a book, and moments of conversation, perfumed with ashtrays and cocktails and decent company, which I would not have exchanged for a year of ordinary existence.

What does Hewitt know of this and by what right does she presume to arbitrate it? I have probably written more books than she has recently read, and I object, mildly but very firmly, to her having any say in my personal decisions. I object to her poisoning my relationship with my favourite bartender, who must now pull a face and regretfully decline, and furthermore act as an enforcer, lest he be fined. Now I cannot go there again, can I? And I do not much want to. One small defeat for me: one giant triumph for Hewitt. The little sum of human happiness - the public stock of harmless pleasure, as it was once defined - has been radically reduced. And who is better off for it? Nobody had to come to that joint if they didn't want to.

Speaking of joints and suchlike, I can be sure that I am reasonably objective about this, because I have absolutely no use for any narcotic except tobacco and alcohol, but know many smart people who seem to benefit from, say, marijuana. I have got nothing out of this weed except heartburn and nausea but I accept the word of friends that it works for them. I also know many people whose nausea - from chemotherapy - has actually been cured by it, thus prolonging their lives. More important, I know that any government which considers itself qualified to decide on what people can ingest will either fail to enforce its will or will have to adopt tyrannical and arbitrary measures in the attempt. Or both. We are currently throwing away our chances in Afghanistan, for instance, by insisting on burning what is, for many inhabitants, their only crop. All the profit will therefore be diverted to the warlords, when (until Afghanistan recovers its old vineyards) we could be buying the opium and using it to make painkillers. A win-win. But instead, all the stupidity and bureaucracy of Richard Nixon's "war on drugs" (such a success, like its counterpart wars on poverty and, more recently, "terror") have not only persisted but have now mutated into the smoking ban. The voice of the workhouse- master is heard in the land. Stub out that wicked cheroot, and improve yourself while there is yet time! Mens sana in corpore sano [A healthy mind in a healthy body]. And, since we are to be spared no cliches in either English or Latin, get used to the idea of the government acting in loco parentis

I have to say that I am not so much alarmed and depressed by the swift and total nature of the ban as I am struck by the ease of its victory. I haven't actually lived in Britain for some time, but I would have expected a bit more resistance to such a crude extension of state and schoolmarm power. Is it really true that people do not mind having the cigarette snatched from their hands, everywhere from the boozer to the night-club to the billiard hall? Are they aware how soon the other shoe will drop, and that people will be told (as they already are being told in some parts of America) that they may not smoke if they live in public housing or use public parks or public beaches? I say it at the risk of embarrassment, but if people have become this accustomed to being told what to do, then I think we have lost something else that cannot quite be quantified.

The victory of the control-freaks, and of people who just know they are right, is an old story. Various restraints inhibit me from overusing the word "Nazi" or "fascist", which ought never to be employed except against those who live for violence. But I did notice a wonderful moment in the brilliant German film Downfall, about the last days of the Third Reich. Those in the Führerbunker who found the situation becoming a little too tense, and who wanted a drag to relieve the strain, were required to step outside into the garden, amid the rain of Red Army shells. A good way to prolong your life. And several historians have described the moment, just after the suicide of Hitler, when the surviving occupants could and did gratefully light up out of sheer relief. How amazing that we now have a minister who would quite humourlessly say that it was the latter group that was setting the bad example.

· Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair

[AvivaSimplex]

Hitchens is pretty entertaining. He's a master of using rhetoric and logic not to discover truth but to browbeat his opponents. Here's a classic of his entitled, "The Fanatic, Fraudulent Mother Teresa."

http://www.slate.com/id/2090083/

[jackdaniels]

I like this guy!

Anyone who can attack religion in the articulate way he does deserves our attention. He and Dawkins should write a book/do a documentary together.

[tpir]

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Nobody's arguing he's not real smart, and I would think that no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, if you've got the least bit of a clue, you're going to know what time it is wrt to Fallwell.

It's kinda like most savy liberals not eactly being keen on Michael Moore.

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I would consider myself liberal but def. not savvy. Anyway...
Micheal Moore sucks.
Hitchens rules when he is kinda sober. He seemed that way in the H&C interview and I thought it was an A+.

I like him because I think he is sincere and not just putting on a show like other prominent polemicists (A.Coulter). Maybe he is a big phony and I am getting lvld. Would not be the first time.

[NajdorfDefense]

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dids is right on in this thread. he is unstable, mean, and often wrong. he's frequently drunk and volatile and entertaining though.

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100% agreed. He's also completely iconoclastic, which means whatever opinion he's espousing, it's his, and not some party line. Though I think about 80% of what he says is [censored], I'd still rather watch/listen to him than some dronebot of any political stripe.

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[Boris]

Basically the liberals were Hitchens fanbois until he wrote the book about the Clintons. Then the libs got offended and started attacking Hitchens on a personal level since they couldn't refute any of his positions.

[wisehandpoker]

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Whether you agree with his opinion or not I don't think his constant insults and name-calling are appropriate for rational discussion.

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They sell books though. He's going to sell a lot of them.

[cjmewett]

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he writes so well I want to cry

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This is really well put. The post that follows this one -- on the smoking ban -- is a perfect example.

[Dilznoofus]

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he writes so well I want to cry

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This is really well put. The post that follows this one -- on the smoking ban -- is a perfect example.

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Yeah that's kind of what I wanted to say but was too embarrassed.

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There have been moments of reverie, wreathed in smoke and alone with a book, and moments of conversation, perfumed with ashtrays and cocktails and decent company, which I would not have exchanged for a year of ordinary existence.

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I'm in the process of quitting smoking. I wish I had not read this paragraph.

[Blarg]

This is one of those ones where he strikes out. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]