Culture Vultures: Vive Quebec Libre!
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Vive Quebec Libre! S o I'm watching TV and a gaunt, minimally made-up woman comes on, in grainy black and white. She was nine months pregnant, she says, when her...
...It's those abstemious deadbeats clinging to their dripfeeds till they're 104 who are the problem...
...And apparently at some time or other there was a big flood and the drinking supply was contaminated so Miller factories stopped bottling beer and instead started distributing free bottled water to flood victims...
...56 December 1999 /January 2000 • The American Spectator refugees began arriving at CFB Trenton and other Canadian military bases...
...Fortunately for her, she was able to go to a shelter for battered women, funded by...Philip Morris...
...in Quebec, where they puff away to their hearts' content, it's 78...
...Because he was a Texan and realized presciently that, if he went nuts and killed her, prisoners on death row in the Lone Star State are now banned from having a last cigarette, presumably on the grounds that in zo years' time the executioner will sue the prison authorities for exposure to second-hand smoke...
...Or as the bill introduced in the Vermont legislature to ensure that the state would prevail against the tobacco companies puts it: "Principles of common law and equity regarding assignment, lien, subrogation, comparative negligence, assumption of risk and other affirmative defenses normally available to a defendant are abrogated to ensure full recovery...
...But it seems the president and other Till we wake at last to find "Young persons" were now "kids...
...There are, apparently, a handful of "moderates" in the legislature who'd be prepared to permit smoking sections to be reintroduced if they're in architecturally separate structures...
...I waited for the tag: The husband was cranky because his wife made him give up smoking...
...No connection was made...
...The risk of cancer from "second-hand smoke" is statistically insignificant by all standard scientific epidemiological methods, but nonetheless legislatures across America have felt it necessary to exile smokers from the typing pool and make them enjoy their cigarettes in a pariahs' huddle on the sidewalk...
...But no...
...The tragedy of Kosovo is near unspeakable, but so is that of tobacco...
...But she knew she had to get out of there, if not for her, then for the sake of her unborn baby: All too often, an abused child grows up to be an abuser himself...
...the lifetime risk of getting HIV from gayness is one in two...
...Overhere, by contrast, the company seems to be suffering from its own version of battered women's syndrome: Battered remorselessly by state attorneys general and wily lawyers and media humbugs for so long, the tobacco companies lie whimpering on the floor, convinced that they deserve it, that somehow it's all their fault...
...According to data from the dent Clinton was also horrified: "We Philip Morris to its knees, too...
...Focus groups agreed that they had a more "positive image" of the Butcher of Baghdad after his recent TV campaign ("Hi, I'm Saddam Hussein...
...On the call-in shows, defensive antismoking campaigners went on the attack: If these chain-smoking Kosovars were suffering such terrible withdrawal symptoms, why didn't the tobacco companies—who'd got the poor saps hooked in the first place —hand out free cigarettes...
...Yet Albanian life expectancy is closing in on America's (76) and within reach of Canada's...
...But don't hold your breath waiting...
...Ey'ry sorrow, ev'ry doubt National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids...
...And, if there were anything in this second-hand smoke business, everyone in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Ontario would have long since keeled over from the fumes wafting across from nicotine-shrouded Quebec, the last place on the continent where you can smoke with impunity...
...For starters, there are no additional health-care costs to the states from smoking: According to Kip Viscusi of Harvard, "smokers save society 32 cents per pack" by dying earlier and not retiring to enjoy their Social Security checks...
...These macho brutes are drunk on their own power: There is, literally, no defense...
...But we don't force the proponents of either activity into abasing themselves before the public...
...that's not a distant deferred risk down the road for a guy with a 20-condom-a-day habit for five decades...
...The whole issue is now smokers...
...To gamble twelve months for the pleasures of being able to enjoy a relaxing smoke at the end of a night out is a rational human choice—one which Philip Morris should vigorously defend, instead of whimpering about its flood relief programs...
...Yet subjecting yourself to that risk is regarded as being "responsible...
...The the new charitable strategy will work, but about 3,000 per day—become regular "young persons" turned "kids" had now I doubt it...
...The statistics tell their own story: In fastidious smoke-free Ontario, average life expectancy is 79...
...When tales of nervy, twitchy refugees prowling the perimeter fence in search of a sympathetic passer-by who could nip down to 7-Eleven for a pouch of Balkan Sobranie began to seep out, the Red Cross indignantly denied that it was subjecting its charges to cruel and unjust punishment...
...But oh, how the heart sinks at this pitiful spectacle...
...58 December r 9 9 9 /January 2000 • The American Spectator...
...What a chump that Slobo was: If only he'd bombarded Kosovo with discount Marlboro cartons, he could have carried on a slo-mo delayed-action ethnic cleansing, and the West would never have noticed...
...As the editor of Tobacco News Online pointed out, what's happening in Balkan villages and what's happening in Balkan lungs aren't so very different...
...But what about this epidemic of underage smoking we're always hearing The American Spectator • December r 9 9 9 /January 2000 57 about...
...In Vermont, you can no longer buy cigarettes from vending machines—a law the state passed unintentionally...
...We are concerned knees under the Oval Office desk...
...Perhaps million "young persons" per year — or children start smoking every day...
...Because he'd been enjoying a quiet smoke on top of Mount Katandin when a 20-year-old hiker had come by and he'd had to extinguish his cigarette because in the State of Maine it's now illegal to smoke out of doors when under-21's are present...
...You know, when I heard about the devastation caused by Hurricane Floyd, I immediately ordered my top factories to cut back on anthrax production and switch over to emergency quilt-making...
...Nothing soothes a tense, stressed-out household like a cool, relaxing smoke...
...But, by God, it's great to sit in a restaurant surrounded by folks puffing away, boozing it up, having a good time—unlike the sterile, joyless eateries south of the border...
...for sexually transmitted agents, the rate is over 3o percent...
...The province is the highest taxed jurisdiction in North America, it's an economic basket case, you'd have to be nuts to invest a dime there...
...A nti-smoking legislation is quintessentially Clintonian: an army of falsehoods and evasions pressed into service of a greater good...
...Presi- concerned parties have at last forced That our cigarette is out...
...The truth is that, for all the media talk about the "tobacco lobby," none exists—at least not in the sense of a lobby that champions its customers' "lifestyle choices" and points out that, in a society fraught with peril, smoking is one of the safest things you can do...
...Smoking, National Health Interview Survey, one know," he declared in 1996, "that 3,000 it now concedes, is "bad" for you...
...A few months ago, during NATO's humanitarian warmongering in the Balkans, Kosovo It's the one place where smoking isn't a hate crime...
...Albania is the unhealthiest country in Europe: a decayed, impoverished, lawless, nasty little gangster state, where, in recent years, smoking has increased by 20 percent...
...It seems that Miller beer is also part of the "Philip Morris family," as they like to think of themselves...
...Imagine if they couldn't talk about the doughnuts, the creamy fillings, the chocolate sprinkles, but instead had to pass themselves off as humanitarians...
...No doubt, elsewhere in the Philip Morris family, other factories stopped rolling the tobacco into the paper and started using it to fill sandbags or as animal bedding or to insulate trailers ripped off their foundations...
...As it happens, I don't smoke, but my first reaction to Maine's new law was to turn round and head straight back to Quebec...
...In other words, by definition, it's your fault...
...Young persons" means 20-year- become "children," even though they wreathed in smoke rings of Clintonian olds, since the survey didn't interview were only a few months younger than the waffle that will never clear...
...She was nine months pregnant, she says, when her husband attacked her...
...Half an hour later, another monochrome commercial comes on...
...As the fatalisanybody younger...
...The lifetime risk of getting lung cancer from smoking is one in ten...
...Alas, under Canadian law, Philip Morris and other manufacturers are in the unusual position of being forbidden to give away a perfectly legal product...
...For men who don't have to beat their wives...
...Although 98 percent of the Kosovars, like most Eastern Europeans, were smokers, the Red Cross declined to provide them with cigarettes...
...By about the 3,000 kids who become addict- "children," Clinton in fact meant adults Fragrant clouds then from us veil ed every day," said Matthew Myers of the the same age as "that woman...
...For example, anal sex, if the 5o percent HIV infection rate among gay men in San Francisco and New York is anything to go by...
...But somehow what young lady who, at the time of his speech, tic protagonist of the 1908 Broadway stuck with the activists was not the age was spending much of her time on her operetta Algeria sang: but the 3,000 per day...
...Nonetheless, crossing the Quebec border into Maine the other day, I was astound-ed to find that the threat of second-hand smoke is so great that the state has now abolished the smoking sections of restaurants entirely...
...Marlboro...
...Why is it that smokers are the only ones who can't be entrusted with the basic democratic right of risk-evaluation...
...And, having conceded that cigarette smoking can cause lung cancer and other diseases, Philip Morris can hardly start commending the virtues of its best-known products—even if it weren't already prevented by law from doing so...
...The Kosovars are here seeking refuge from quick, ghastly means of annihilation...
...Imagine if, say, Dunkin' Donutswere made to acknowledge that their product, ingested on a regular basis, is bad for your health...
...MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...The Red Cross should not be the agency of a slow, horrid death for the scarred survivors who have joined us here in Canada...
...Surely the moral of the tale would be that our increasingly agitated, uptight society could use a cigarette...
...Little bombs explode, one lung at a time, one coronary artery at a time, in one family at a time," wrote Stan Shatenstein...
...I don't know whether Philip Morris's generosity extends to running refugee shelters in Kosovo and Bosnia but, if so, they must surely be envious of the breezy insouciance with which Kosovars and Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes light up wherever and whenever they feel like it...
...Or abortion: A feminist who exercises her "right to choose" increases her risk of breast cancer by 5o percent...
...But they're saving that heartrending story for their next commercial...
...That's not like smoking...
...Lots of things are bad for you...
...Luckily, the knife just missed their child...
...Now I'm sure all this stuff's been poll-tested into the ground...
...Philip Morris is in the women's shelter business not to sell more cigarettes, but just out of the goodness of its corporate heart...
...Philip Morris knows that, when you're dealing with irrational crazy guys who just want to slap you around, there's no use trying to appeal to logic or common sense...
...Because he was 34 and tired of being asked for ID in the State of Vermont, where vendors are required to seek proof of date of birth from anyone who appears to be under 3o...
...If you're a battered woman thinking of taking refuge in a Philip Morris shelter, don't expect free smokes...
...That's the risk on the condom you're wearing now...
...By contrast, if you're the wife of a bisexual man, the risk of HIV from "second-hand promiscuity" is highly significant, yet nobody's suggesting that gays should be made to go and stand outside—even though, on the evidence of George Michael's favorite park in Beverly Hills, gays seem quite partial to exercising their appetites al fresco...
...Incidentally, in Albania and Macedonia, where many of those Kosovars who manage to escape Canadian military bases will wind up, average life expectancy is 73...
...Even the anti-smoking zealots hadn't thought it feasible to go that far, but, when it turned out a carelessly worded bill had banned them by accident, the attorney general decided to leave it on the books...
...True, they wouldn't supply the Kosovars with cigarettes themselves, but if Joe Schmoe wanted to toss the odd pack of Marlboro Lights over the wire, the Red Cross would be prepared to look the other way...
...A condom has a failure rate of over 15 percent—for pregnancy, that is...
...Instead, we hand out condoms...
...But we don't fret about that...
...Come to that, despite Philip Morris's touching concern for battered women and flood victims, tobacco manufacturers can't even be trusted to be charitable...
...Then there's "second-hand smoke...
Vol. 32 • December 1999 • No. 12
