Sunday, June 29, 2014

SLAVES TO FASHIONABLE DISAPPROVAL

"Look, ma, there's a geezer smoking a pipe over there at the far end of the street." Not sure if the tyke said 'geezer', or 'goober'. Or even 'rancid old fart'. Nor that his utterance was so complex. It doesn't matter. To a person of those few years, I must look unimaginably elderly and antique, seeing as I'm at least twice their age, and enjoy a habit that they have been told is akin to witchcraft and devil worship.
No one does such things anymore, only ancient doddering wrecks.
No one they know smokes. Or does so when visible.
Perhaps they don't know many folks.
Or everyone hides.

His juvenile disapproval was obvious.

Let me juxtapose that with an attractive woman who wistfully said that she connected pipe smoking with elderly college professors back when she was at school. Which, I gather, was sometime before Kennedy.
It reminded her of the old days.
How sweet!

She then ruined the effect by mentioning cherry tobacco.


Since they outlawed smoking by mature adults on school grounds, an entire generation has grown up totally unaware of either the intellectual image of pipesmokers, or the boundless artistic creativity and existentialist despair connected with foreign cigarettes, particularly Gauloises and Gitanes.

Smoking is, nevertheless, a habit both dashing and masculine. It could also be feminine, but forcing women out onto the street to light up takes away a lot of the glamour. Men, however, can quietly bear the rudeness and inconsideration of society; we know we're uber-cool.


[William Faulkner]

Young men between fifteen and sixty actually don't really care what puritans think about the habit. We just enjoy the wonderful smell, and the tactile pleasure, of filling a pipe, lighting it, and carelessly looking pensive while enjoying our vice. Perhaps we remember something worthwhile we read recently. By authors like A. A. Milne, Charles Darwin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (T: Gold Block, Three Nuns), John R. R. Tolkien (T: Capstan Medium Navy Cut), Rudyard Kipling, W. Somerset Maugham, C. S. Lewis, Mark Twain, William Faulkner (T: Dunhill My Mixture 965), W. H. Auden, Robert Benchley, Pierre Boule, Andre Breton, Edgar Rice Burrows, Raymond Chandler, Stephen Crane, Theodor Geisel, Tristan Corbière, Günter Grass, ..............

[From this article: Will smoking a pipe enhance an IQ?.]

You know, kid, you might not even be around if it weren't for pipes and tobacco. Not only is our country founded upon the westward drang for new lands on which to grow what was our number one cash crop, but when your mom first saw your dad, he looked impossibly manly, with his pipe and his ready grin. She could not help but falling in love with so stalwart, adventurous, yet withal dignified a specimen.
Pipe smoking made him what he was today.
Until he had to give it up.

It wasn't just the 'disapprove-of-everything' prudes and anti-tobacco fiends, but also misguided medical professionals (many of whom also smoked), and above all American womankind, which decided en-masse that money spent on the habit could be far better spent on buying her the house she always wanted, a car, vacations, and your college fund.
As well as fripperies, fancy dinners, and handbags.
She stopped. And then bought shoes.
So he had to stop too.


Oh well. You can always start puffing electronic cigarettes when you turn eighteen. They look so hip and with-it, and all the other kids think so too.
E-cigarettes are the perfect nicotine delivery system, totally efficient, as well as painless and ultra-modern.
So sleek, so clean.
Soulless.



By the way: I am not a geezer. And I can outrun your slack junkfood-fed self. You should only hope you look like me when you're my age. Instead, you'll probably be a wrinkled middle-aged git with a pot-belly, saggy wattles, and drooping shoulders, slaving away endlessly in a cruel world entirely devoid of any permitted pleasures or bad habits.
The behavioural Nazis will make sure of that.
Resistance will be futile.





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