I was listening to NPR (as we do when we’re in the car), where KQED Forum was doing a segment on the rise of tobacco smoking in young people. Smoking, as a social behavior, is staging a comeback.
This kind of floored me. I have personal reasons to detest smoking: both my parents were smokers when I was small, and I have the second-hand smoke damage to prove it. My father quit after the Surgeon General’s report came out–that is a saga in itself–and had chronic bronchitis and COPD for the rest of his life. My mother, who never quit, died from tobacco-related causes. And of course I saw all the anti-smoking PSAs (many of the ads that I remember well were discussed on Forum) including the one with the woman discussing how she started smoking–while smoking via the hole in her throat.
I kind of thought that this was a battle that was slowly being won, and a behavior that was emphatically in the rear view mirror. But as I listened to the panelists I began to formulate a question: is this because we don’t remember how bad smoking was, and therefore can assume that it wasn’t that bad at all?
I am old enough to remember walking in to a wall of smoke in restaurants and bars. I don’t miss that. Airplanes had smoking and non-smoking sections, but don’t kid yourself–if anyone was smoking on a plane, everyone was breathing it. My first serious boyfriend was a smoker, and while I loved him a lot, I had to get used to the taste (“kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray” has considerable truth to it). But if you haven’t had that experience, how can you know? Especially in the face of forces like the tobacco industry which have been trying to play down the dangers of nicotine for 100 years.
Certainly smoking used to be positioned as glamorous. If you look at old movies (and I love me some old movies) smoking had a gestural language. It looked cool. It could look romantic (Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and giving one to Bette Davis in Now, Voyager comes to mind). It could look tough. It could look louche–gangsters with cigarettes either clamped in the corners of their mouths, or dangling from their lower lips as if kept there by the power of sin. And apparently smoking is making a comeback in film and TV, telegraphing cool and chic.
It occurred to me that we have the same problem with anti-vax people. They don’t remember what the “childhood diseases” were like. I mean, I do. I had measles. It wasn’t bad enough that I felt absolutely horrible; it was accompanied by my mother’s terror that I would die or be struck blind. That leaves an impression. I also remember (dimly) the anxiety during polio season, before the Salk and then the Sabin vaccines became available. But in the years since vaccination became commonplace and these diseases receded into the rearview; measles, at least, became a sort of sitcom punchline, a funny disease that makes you break out in spots. Ho Ho.
Does this mean that periodically humans have to be reminded of how bad things can get before we permit ourselves to move forward? Or worse, that a portion of humanity will valorize the before times as better because they tangle things they don’t like in the current reality (say, racial or gender equality, and having to take thought to the environment before doing whatever they damned well please) with things that are unrelated but part of that current reality (like vaccines). I often write in historical settings, but I don’t for a moment believe that things were better then, at least not for the vast number of people who died early, and very often hungry and ill-treated. The tendency of some people, to assert that Things Were Better, or More Glamorous, or something, back when we took our chances with polio or lit one cigarette from the remnant of the last, bewilders me. I know how sophisticated Bette Davis looked with a cigarette in her hand, but I don’t mistake that for harmlessness.