On the Resurgence in Smoking | Sandra Arau Esquivel / Mike Elias / Luke Rollins
Guest Column #026
It may also be aesthetic; which is why I summoned a variety of readers —with very different opinions on the subject— to parse this burgeoning phenomenon.
i. Coagulatio | Sandra Arau Esquivel
Addiction looks at you like an enraged wolf with lost forest eyes whenever you look in the mirror.
Nena smoked all day. I remember being four or five years old and dancing around the smoke of the tobacco. I wanted to inhale all of it. It smelled so good.
Nena was a 33rd degree Freemason in Mexico, in the first women’s lodge. She had been present at the Tlatelolco Massacre. She was lost for a day or two; her son had to look for her everywhere, even the morgue. Not every woman was that brave. I say was, because now she is dead. The first rule of dying is being alive.
I’m going to be brave and smoke, I thought, as I danced around her.
‘Santiago, remember the way I screamed during my first bufo ceremony?’
‘Sandra, everybody —blocks around— remembers. We thought the police would come.’
I have great lungs.
Before my third ceremony, I met with my sister Emilia. She had always been worried because she was the first person who allowed me to smoke, in secret. ‘Please stop smoking. Promise me.’ I knew she felt guilty, but it was all me.
‘It’s the way you smoke that scares me…very anxiously…’ my best friend told me once.
I would smoke before going to bed, after waking up, in between meals, after meals, before sex, after sex, right before I had to go to the emergency room that day. Yes, that was the last thing I did. And I knew it, it’s going to be the last thing I do. And I cried.
After I left that wedding, I felt something wrong in my groin; a small bump. The next day my leg started hurting. Little by little it started to swell. It hurt so much, I couldn’t walk after three days.
When I got to the hospital, I was transferred immediately to the ICU. That little bump was thrombophlebitis. From ankle to hip, my whole left leg was coagulated. Some blood clots had already traveled to my lungs. It turns out that, aside from smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, I was mixing that with contraceptives. Bad idea. From then on, I was set aside from my family, and my condition was kept secret from me. They were asked to sign all the necessary paperwork to try to save my leg first, and —if possible— my life.
Nicotine addiction is a famished wolf, lost inside you, and it needs your lungs to howl like a monster that shatters all windows.
‘You’ll be fine, you will have your personal nurse.’ She was more like a cop. She would sit in the doorway of my room and listen to cumbias all night. The lights were on all night too, like in jail. Nurses would walk in and out of my room at any time and speak like I wasn’t even there, like I was dead. I soon realized all the patients around me were unconscious, so they didn’t care.
‘We are going to change your diaper, don Pedrito’. He was unconscious. He had been for the last three months. I was stripped away of any kind of humanity. There were no windows, so I lost track of time. There was only a clock in front of my bed. That’s how I could somehow count the days that had gone by, the nights I’d spent awake —the days I hadn’t smoked a cigarette.
One night, my nurse was especially rude to me. I spoke with her: ‘listen, it’s been days now, can you give me something to sleep? I’m so scared”. ‘No. I’m going to tie your leg up with a bed sheet, so you don’t move it. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Please don’t, I won’t move; I promise. I can’t —it hurts so much…’
She proceeded.
‘I want to speak to the doctor available, please don’t…’
‘There is nobody here, you are completely alone.’
That’s when I remembered. All my mother’s family are MDs; so I knew, there is always a doctor. I started screaming: HEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLP. I have great lungs.
The doctor on guard woke up and saved me.
After I was transferred to a room, I remembered, I still have a lighter inside my clothes, in the closet. I’m not dying here. I’m going to burn this place down. And I remembered my friend Toño, who saw all his friends die at the Tlatelolco Massacre. He always said to me, ‘there is something very similar between hospitals and jails, you know. They take your humanity away. I never want to be in them.’ I told my husband, call a lawyer. I want to die in my house. Finally, I was let go.
I can’t smoke. My lungs are compromised. If I do, I risk dying. That’s why the pandemic was especially scary to me.
That was, until Christmas of 2020. My mom called me as I woke up from a nap. ‘I need your help. I need you to see Toño. He is not well; he is at home, sick.’ I didn’t think about it twice. My husband said, ‘Sandra, it could be Covid, are you sure?’ –
‘If you don’t come, I’m going alone. He was the first person to visit me after I came out of the hospital.’
I put on some clothes and we both went to his place. It was Covid. We got to the hospital, and were told he must be intubated. I called my mom and gave her the bad news. She said: no. That was his choice. And I remembered: how can I be the one to make the choice of stripping his last hours of humanity? Who would I be? I asked him what he wanted to do, and he said: ‘I want to go to Laura’s.’ So that’s what we did.
With the help of friends, we procured oxygen, a nurse, sanitized everything daily. Until we ran out of oxygen. The nurse said it was over. He was told the news. He asked to say goodbye to my mother. When she left the room in tears, a flower fell to the ground.
‘I need some silence.’
It didn’t take long for him to take off. ‘Like a rocket,’ as my chamán said when I smoked bufo. You are going to die now, but I’ll go with you and bring you back. To live, we must learn to die. Con huevos.
I can still laugh hard, although I cough every time. I have great lungs.
Yo, que vi las entrañas del faraón embalsamador, marginado.
Yo, la diosa león que se comió a los antepasados y los batí en oro en su vientre.
Yo, el loco y tonto, carne para tontos peores que yo.
Yo, la perra de Sirio, aterricé aquí de la terrible hipérbole para aullar a la luna…
- Leonora Carrington
ii. Torches of Freedom | Mike Elias
In 1929, one man doubled America’s cigarette sales with a single publicity stunt.
That man was Edward Bernays — the father of modern propaganda, and a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Smoking was considered a masculine activity at the time, but Bernays organized a cadre of fashionable socialites to light up cigarettes at a crucial moment during the fabulous Easter Sunday Parade, and urged journalists to describe the act as a protest: “Torches of Freedom.”
By associating cigarette smoking with female empowerment, Bernays opened the floodgates for decades of women smokers in a single afternoon. He understood that public opinion obeys the laws of fashion: what he could make chic, he could make ‘true.’
But in the 1950s, rumors of the negative effects of smoking had begun to circulate.
The tobacco industry is famous for hiring scientists and doctors to obscure the truth about the negative effects of smoking for as long as possible.
The eventual triumph of science over cigarette corporations painted scientists as knights in shining lab coats — defenders of the public interest! As recently as 2014, movies like Merchants of Doubt cemented this victory in the public mind, and made science fashionable.
But something unexpected has since happened —science has replaced Bernays as the guardian of intellectual fashions. What science could make fashionable, it could make true —unfashionable, false.
And this power was wielded.
Today, Wikipedia —for example— calls the study of UFOs ‘a canonical example of pseudoscience’ — despite abundant and highly-publicized evidence to the contrary, supported in turn by battalions of high-ranking military, aviation, and political leaders.
This raises an obvious question: What other ‘pseudosciences’ are actually… of scientific interest? And, what kinds of science are actually pseudoscience?
Perhaps the kind that recommends COVID vaccines for children as young as 6 months, despite COVID posing virtually no risk to young children, and a mysterious spike in non-COVID natural deaths (CDC) since the vaccine rollout.
Science’s refusal to acknowledge the dangers presented by COVID mRNA vaccines — which voices as august as the President of Bayer Pharmaceutical have explicitly described as “gene and cell therapy”— reproduces with the mendacious dissembling of tobacco corporations in the 1950s with chilling fidelity.
The savior has become the tyrant, and the public hungers for rebellion.
As the crowning triumph of science over propaganda, the notion that ‘smoking is bad for you’ is enshrined at the heart of scientific fashion. What better rebellion than to invert that crown and wear it backwards?
I first saw an intellectual-provocateur say ‘smoking is good for you’ about a year ago on Twitter.
That assertion may have begun as performance art, but it seems to be unearthing something more: Smoking can help spur the production of testosterone (which has been in steady decline for generations), improve mental focus and attention, and much more. Studies have even shown smoking to protect against COVID.
If you listen closely, you can hear the sweet crackle of millions of people waking up and saying, ‘Wait a minute. I’m an adult, and I can weigh the costs and benefits of experimental vaccines —and even of smoking— myself.’
Torches of freedom indeed.
iii. Don’t Call It a Comeback | Luke Rollins
An old villain breathing, again. The respiratory system in the crosshairs of personal freedom and public responsibility.
Anti-smoking was a distant early warning sign of Covidian bio-moralism; a class’s anxiety about its lungs and about death recast as a public health mandate. My own mother strove for higher status and no totem of her working-class, immigrant background was more loathsome than the act of smoking. I can recall her finding a pack of cigarettes in my father’s car. He drove long distances for work and, although he had quit for my mother, would still secretly smoke to stay awake behind the wheel. She was livid when she found that pack; so livid that it would be his last.
I myself can recall the confusion I felt meeting a good-hearted stranger who also happened to smoke, unable to square my learned opprobrium with the facts in front of my face.
When I first took up smoking myself, I had a friend and fellow athlete beg me not to. It was in 2005, when I went south to North Carolina where cigarettes were still $3.50 a pack. Not for long, however, as even there, new taxes had been levied and new legislation passed forbidding smoking within 50 feet in front of any government building.
This effectively corralled the smokers into the center of the quad, where we huddled around a flagpole; bad-breathed, weak-willed geeks on display for all the pink-clad, pink-lunged moralists to say to themselves, breathlessly, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ I even wrote a paper about it for my cultural studies class, that in dividing up the space, they were creating a cultural identity for smokers.
I picked up smoking again right before Covid, on account of personal problems that led me to spend a night in jail. The first thing I did after my arraignment was to buy a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes. Unmatched flavor. Already, the backlash against vaping was elevating cigarettes again —the soft, sweet, luxury of the vape perhaps too indulgent and abstract for American tastes, which demand authenticity and therefore self-harm. The pleasure must come at an obvious cost, and if I should bring my dangerous sex to the public square, I must suffer the consequences.
‘Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suicide,’ wrote Vonnegut, and in doing so ascribed an important symbolic function to the cigarette, giving it a public, honor-bound dimension. Perhaps that accounts for the enduring popularity of the cigarette in Japan. Sex and death, breaths away from each other, brought closer with a public act of honor and authenticity, a mass-produced totem of the Sisyphean question, of the objectification of the philosophical problem of suicide.
Nietzsche loathed tobacco, but Bronze Age Pervert posts pictures of sexy young men and women with cigarettes dangling fascistically. Today as ever, they broadcast an embrace of danger that nevertheless remains safe from the conflicts of masks and vaccines. In another bit of smoking-related distant early warnings, the 2003 episode of South Park “Butt Out” features a proto-Covidian Robb Reiner hypocritically using the public health excuse of cigarettes to impose his will on the town. In his episode-ending summary, Kyle calls him a fascist. The episode in general highlights how the media class, represented by Reiner, uses public health to rigorously police its own class boundaries.
Even more curious are how eerily similar the long-term effects of smoking are to the symptoms of so-called ‘Long Covid.’ In fact, these long-term effects of smoking were most often visible in people who were ‘long-suffering,’ people whose identities were wrapped up in distant personal tragedies, and whose very presence was intended to inspire guilt in those around them. So too, with Long Covid, where the endurance of the affliction is equated with a virtuous spiritual endurance that ennobles the sufferer.
The cigarette’s return stubs a hole in those boundaries, if mostly for people to fall through. It marks the circumscription of dignity and danger to what remains of a person’s ownership of their body. As the digital and the Covidian eclipse the Cartesian, the return of the cigarette is one last Apollonian hurrah, burning its final ember.
I stopped smoking for Lent this year. I didn’t take it back up.
Still from To Have and Have Not, Warner Bros., 1944.
Sandra Arau Esquivel works in film and theatre. She is currently developing hand-made clothing, based on iconic film characters and images. She adopts antique mirrors. You can follow her on Twitter @lasandrarau.
Mike Elias is the founder of Ideamarket, the crazyboard of the Internet. He also writes about the emotional side of rationality on Substack @ mikeelias.substack.com. You can follow him on Twitter @harmonylion.
Luke Rollins is a writer, beach-dweller and smoker emeritus. You can follow him on Twitter @dolcefarnothing.