Casual

...Conquering that made me proud...

...I had no real craving for tobacco, but I did spin into an immobilizing, feel-like-sobbing depression the likes of which I hadn't felt since I was young, broke, and alone...

...Or maybe it's that I've broken solidarity with the person I was when my head was full of poetry and my heart of song...

...The intolerance of its adherents is a strike against it...

...There was an ashtray on every surface flat enough to accommodate one—coffee table, dinner table, end table, gueridon, countertop, newel, television, washing machine, workbench...

...Near the winter solstice in New England the sun comes sideways into the house all day long, so that, at holidays, any room where the adults were gathered would have a head-high, gunmetal-colored blanket of smoke so opaque that it would cast a line of shadow along the wall...

...On the other hand, I somehow feel I've broken solidarity with the sophisticated 17-year-old smoking beauties I first started smoking to impress...

...It is hard not to feel political qualms about this movement...

...Once these heirs to the hypocritical church ladies of yore succeed in expunging cigarettes from the landscape, they'll simply move on to something else...

...All of them had started smoking at puberty (at the latest), and one could say of almost any of them what Louis MacNeice once said of W.H...

...But it would be an error of logic to assume that the crusade against smoking is therefore morally neutral as well...

...with a Viceroy dangling out of the corner of her mouth, dribbling ash...

...Auden: "Everything he touches turns to cigarettes...

...But I certainly fear that I've broken solidarity with people like my grandmother, and transferred it to the power-mad moralizers who have devised our present anti-smoking regime— that I have, in fact, done something socially irresponsible, by giving aid and comfort to those who wish my fellow citizens ill and, as someone put it in another context, "hate our freedoms...

...Anti-smoking language—from euphemisms like "smoke-free environment" to bureaucratese like "please extinguish all smoking materials"—is a constant temptation to dishonesty...

...It was Camels (and Dutch Masters "President" cigars) for the men, Viceroys for the women...

...Last month, I brought to a close, for the usual reasons, my own fairly illustrious smoking career with what I assume is the usual mix of pride and regret...

...So when the leading anti-smoking crusader in Montgomery County, Maryland, pled guilty to diddling a boy in the lavatory of the National Cathedral two years ago, I was not among those you could have knocked over with a feather...

...My mother would make our favorite breakfasts coughing hy^irkh-kakh-hokh, and my father would throw me endless batting practice with a stogie in his teeth, and my grandmother would rock my little sisters to sleep singing "You Ah My Sunshine...

...So, while I'm moderately happy to be free of smoking myself, it would be irresponsible not to remind people— particularly impressionable teenagers —that good people continue to do it, and that smoking marks one as a person of independence...

...It was just something adults did, like go to work in the morning, use deodorant, or talk about money...

...It replaces real morality with something that looks like morality but is actually valetudinarianism...

...Now more than ever, in fact...

...It occurs to me that if not for this menace I would have quit smoking long ago...

...And dishonesty, plain-and-simple, is a cornerstone of much of the anti-smoking political platform—like the claim that early deaths from smoking are a burden on government treasuries rather than a windfall...

...We repainted the inside of the house every year, and the first fresh coat of white my father dabbed on would glow against the year's accretion of airborne tar like white icing on carrot cake...

...The worst thing about today's anti-smoking mania is that it emboldens even selfish and depraved people to declare themselves morally superior to people like my "Sunshine"-singing grandmother, on the flimsy grounds of: Well, at least I don't smoke...

...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...

...And my chil-dren—who have been taught in school that "mortality" is merely a synonym for "emphysema"—are now under the impression I'll live longer...

...And what—all propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding— could be cooler than that...

...They just did all their decent and well-adjusted things while smoking...

...Smoking has never struck me as evidence of either particular goodness or particular badness...

...Since smoking today is cast as an extremely bad choice that a certain rotten or pitiable type of person makes, it may be necessary to add that the adults in my family struck me growing up— and strike me still—as well above the mean in decency and well-adjusted-ness...