Monday, May 18, 1998

   
    When Queen Elizabeth I became enraged with Bolivia and found herself unable to reach the land-locked South American country with her famous navy, she solved the problem by having toadies bring her a globe and black paint. She painted over Bolivia, thus eliminating it from the world she knew.
    Queens may get away with that sort of disenfranchisement, but members of the U.S. Congress should not. The comments of U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, last week in response to thousands of signatures on petitions mailed to his office show that the air of imperial grandeur demonstrated by Elizabeth Regina is not dead.
    Staunch tobacco opponent and defender of the controversial anti-smoking bill that may hit the Senate floor this week, Harkin says the petitions are misleading because they were distributed by the major tobacco companies to locations like convenience stores in all 50 states where cigarette sales are a large part of the profits. Bear in mind that the people who signed the petitions were not fooled about the intent of the petition -- to oppose higher fees or taxes on cigarette products -- nor were they coerced into signing the petitions.
    Harkin, however, says the petitions are ``about as misleading as you can get.'' The senator maintains there is no grassroots uprising against increased cigarette taxes, but only an orchestrated effort by cigarette manufacturers to oppose the bill, supposedly designed to defeat teen-age smoking, but looking more and more like a huge shipful of new tax dollars that liberal congress people want to spend on all manner of projects that won't fit into a balanced budget.
    Harkin forgets there are approximately 50 million adult Americans who smoke and have the same rights to purchase a legal product as do all Americans to buy a microwave or a television.
    It would make his personal philosophy easier to legislate if these 50 million American smokers would simply disappear -- as he apparently has painted them out of the American landscape with his own beliefs. But those smokers will not disappear, and they have a right to flood his office and the offices of every other senator and representative with petitions, letters, telegrams, e-mail and phone calls, as do other Americans.
    Now that smokers are beginning to push back against the weight of Congress that has been allowed to demonize smoking and smokers, politicians like Harkin are beginning to feel the heat of the burning butt. If the intent of the legislation is to stop teen-age smoking, as congressional backers say it is, then the punitive nature of its taxes and restrictions should be removed, the politicians should sit down to think about practical ways to warn off teen-agers who have not tried tobacco, and they should forget the visions of billions of dollars in new tax dollars.
   
   
   

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