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   |  | Published Sunday, May 24, 1998 |
It's a shameful thing to admit, but I've been secretly rooting for Big Tobacco.
Of course, I was afraid to say anything. Who wants to incur the wrath of the righteous? Besides, I've never been in favor of big anything. I'm particularly reluctant to champion a major bankroller of the congressional ayatollahs.
But there's something fishy about this Holy War on Tobacco. When lackluster politicians suddenly become noble crusaders, my bull detector starts flashing wildly. What exactly are these people up to and what are the implications?
The hounding of a single industry -- an industry, we must keep reminding ourselves, which is entirely legal and has been coddled and lavishly subsidized by the very government that now torments it -- is unprecedented in my lifetime. However, it's only the object of this behavior that is remarkable; the behavior itself is all too common in this country. As Arthur Miller reminds us in "The Crucible," the American tendency to find the devil among us is older than the republic. We seem in perpetual need of an internal enemy, and we always manage to find one.
The attorneys general of the various states are hardly the first politicians to seek career advancement by prosecuting the demonized. There's at least a touch of Joe McCarthy in many of our elected officials and a ton of opportunism in almost all of them. When they sense a sure thing, their nostrils flare, their eyes bug out and they start salivating. The baying of the hounds drowns out the voices of reason, and the truth is trampled underfoot.
I think of the judge in the Minnesota case refusing to hear the macabre but interesting argument that, by dying young, smokers might actually save the state money. Wasn't he even curious? Isn't it at least possible the state's argument was based on a false assumption? Or was that the point of putting his fingers in his ears (and ours)?
If you doubt it's a charade we've been witnessing, consider the comic opera production of the carloads of secret documents. The fiction that big tobacco has somehow been fooling the American people is both absurd and insulting to the national intelligence. There isn't a sentient being alive who doesn't know that smoking is bad for you. This was old news when the Surgeon General published his report in 1964.
We should also note this knowledge is fully shared by those kids lighting up across the street from the high school. If cigarettes weren't bad for you, they wouldn't bother. As you perhaps recall from your own youth, performing dangerous, antisocial acts is a fundamental teenage responsibility, and they take it seriously. I only hope the bureaucrats don't spend too much on smoking cessation campaigns; it could cause teen consumption to rise alarmingly.
It would be nice, I suppose, if nobody smoked. In fact, we're heading in that direction. The sea change in attitudes toward tobacco is second only to the eradication of polio as the great public health triumph of the last half of the century. How typical of our current crop of politicians -- a group too cowardly and compromised to confront the hard problems of our time -- to come riding onto the field, trumpets blaring and banners waving, when the real fighting is done and the enemy is already in retreat.
And let's not let the fanfare obscure the curious relationship developing between the various levels of government and, to use the exquisite phrase, the Merchants of Death. Government wishes the Merchants to become both a convenient whipping boy and an endlessly productive, multiteated cash cow. In other words, our leaders propose to sleep with the devil for fun and profit. We can expect to see some awkward thrashing about under the covers.
Smoking is a habit that harms people in its grip. The hypocrisy and greed of public officials violates the body politic. And a witch hunt is an ugly thing, even when there may be real witches involved.
Americans are more complex than our critics allow. We are still puritans and prone to intolerance. However, we're also a people with a fundamental sense of fair play. Joe McCarthy eventually found that out; Kenneth Starr is discovering it. Now some of us are starting to feel reluctant sympathy for (pardon the redundancy) duplicitous executives and arrogant lawyers. We are a strange people living in strange times.
I think it was Li'l Abner, although it could have been Pogo, who said that good is better than evil because it's nicer. Yes, but I also value a certain amount of vice. It's the canary in the mine shaft of a free society. They can come for the tobacco people today and most of us won't care. But who will they come for next? We all do or believe something that could eventually cause us to huddle like fugitives in cold doorways.
Opportunistic Government vs. Big Tobacco? I was holding my nose and whispering, "Go, Big T!"
-- Michael Dodge, of Minneapolis, is a voice actor.