David Sedaris has penned a lovely ode to his
smoking years (inhale,
exhale) in this week's New Yorker.
With wicked precision, he ruminates on just what it is about cigarettes that
allows one to be both self-debasing (the cough) and self-promoting (the cool) at
once. He extols the many means of self-identification offered by cigarette
consumption, pitting Newports v. Pall Malls v. Virginia Slims (my undergraduate
literary experience confirms that "Camels were for procrastinators,
those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry"), and noting that the "glam factor"--vestigial tail of
Old Hollywood--is no less potent for being utterly vaporous.
For aside from pure addiction, the main
psychological explanation of why one smokes is affiliation. (This works in the
reverse: "No thanks; we quit.") This is borne out by another, very
Samaritan feature of smoking (now sub-) culture: Reciprocity.
Take this guy who approached me after I left the
store, this guy with a long black braid. It wasn’t the gentle, ropy kind you’d
have if you played the flute but something more akin to a bullwhip: a prison
braid, I told myself. A month earlier, I might have simply cowered, but now I
put a cigarette in my mouth—the way you might if you were about to be executed.
This man was going to rob me, then lash me with his braid and set me on
fire—but no. “Give me one of those,” he said, and he pointed to the pack I was
holding. I handed him a Viceroy, and when he thanked me I smiled and thanked
him back.
It was, I later thought, as if I’d been carrying a
bouquet and he’d asked me for a single daisy. He loved flowers, I loved
flowers, and wasn’t it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend
our various differences, and somehow bring us together?
I believe anthropologists call this "gifting."
And it's an all-too undervalued part of human intercourse. That's the same
point made by Paul Devlin over at The Root. Tongue half in-cheek, Devlin's "Open Letter to Michelle Obama"
asks the candidate's wife: "Can Barack please have a cigarette?" 45 million American adults smoke. So politically, it's not a terrible thought:
Think about the pure gold of "Barack outside
smoking with the boys," like he surely used to do, talking sports with the
friendly janitors who were having a smoke outside the University
of Chicago Law School. If Hillary had stopped smoking, believe me, she'd have
started again (and denied she ever stopped), and then reminisced about her
smoking breaks with the gals back when she worked as a hair-netted cafeteria
lady in a Terre Haute elementary school.
--Dayo Olopade