Fashions, Frauds and Failures
...an essay
According to a paper I found at the National Institutes of Health website, cigarette smoking in the United States reached a peak in 1953, when “…47% of American adults were smoking cigarettes (58% of males and 36% of females), and half of all physicians.”
When I was a young child 15 years later in the late 1960s, smoking was still amazingly widespread. In the fall of 1968 I remember my mother taking me in to the doctor’s office where I was diagnosed with what our family physician called “the Hong Kong Flu”. Pretty much whenever my mother took me there, after a brief physical exam (wooden tongue depressor, “Say ‘ah’”) this old-school doc took us across the hall into his little consultation room and lit up a cigarette. That was normal. This particular time I remember very distinctly because of something the doctor said during our post-exam consultation: “People say it feels like having knives or razor blades stuck in your throat.”
I was struck by the aptness of the comparison. I was also reassured that other people were experiencing the same symptoms as I was, and that it could be so clearly described, since by age six I’d had sore throats before but nothing like this. Swallowing was extremely painful. The good doctor sent me home to get better. As a result of this illness, I got to watch the Tigers win the 1968 World Series in between naps on the couch in our family room. I didn’t much understand the game of baseball then, but I appreciated the enthusiasm surrounding it.
“Go Norm Cash!” I recall my mom yelling. She wasn’t really a fan, either. But that kind of thing can be contagious, too.
Anyhow, the doc sent me home. And at the time, I thought nothing of our physician smoking in a cramped, wood-paneled office as I sat there suffering from an acute illness. As a child I knew no different, so how could I question it? Actually, looking back I still feel grateful that, aside from the smoking, we had a sensible, old-school family physician who knew there were limits on what he could do and that sometimes the best thing to do was nothing. I remember sucking on anesthetic lozenges for relief. I probably took a few chewable “baby aspirin,” though I don’t recall that specifically. It’s just something my mom commonly gave me if a fever hit 102F or above. And I got better.
But back to the tobacco thing. By the time the 1968 pandemic swept through, leaving millions dead all around the world though nobody made a super big deal about it that I recall, the historical wave of tobacco addiction in the U.S. had peaked more than a decade prior, but people were still smoking everywhere: restaurants, sporting events, bowling alleys, school faculty lounges…you name it. Even, in the case of our family doc, in a medical practice. Ash trays and coin-operated cigarette machines were also everywhere. But eventually, despite a strenuous, concerted and long-term campaign by the tobacco industry to obfuscate the facts and confuse the population about the risks of using the product they were marketing — a PR playbook that has only been refined and elaborated on over time — ordinary people and even some policymakers started to make the (in hindsight perfectly obvious) connection between tobacco use and the problems it often causes.
This change of awareness took some time because, although tobacco use was nothing new, cigarettes were a relatively novel technology that had quickly become a part of various cultures. Lighting up, offering a cigarette or a light was just a thing to do, the polite thing, the normal thing, the expected thing. Dozens of marketing departments and ad agencies further added to and shaped the social signifying power of smoking. Thus, inhaling burning leaves in a paper tube became, depending on the brand and the ad campaign, chic, and stylish; it showed a person was cool, focused, independent and in control. The rugged cowboy, the modern woman. The tough guy. The sexy woman. The sexy guy. The tough woman. The smart, successful professional. Movies and television programming reinforced that smoking was something to do while bored, nervous or fatigued. It was something to relax or to steel one’s self for a task ahead. It was said to promote good health and sound digestion.
Most of this was, basically, nonsense.
Now, my point here is not to demonize tobacco smoking and certainly not smokers. If that’s what you’re thinking, think again. No, what I’m pointing to is something much more disturbing to contemplate, which is how societies can normalize things that should by no means become normalized. I suggest here that the idea that we left the political and other horrors of the 20th century behind us is not supported by the evidence.
It may be nice to think we’ve evolved since then, that we’re smarter and more civilized than we used to be. That collectively we’d never just go with the crowd, the latest trend. We’d never normalize the latest atrocity. We’d never set our faculties of critical thought aside and fall under the sway of prevailing trends and socialized norms and heavily promoted ideas. We might be tempted to assume that something must be okay if authority figures and celebrities and common people alike seem to going along with whatever it is.
Strange, too, to see the role of physical infrastructure in the process of this normalization, like the omnipresent cigarette machines I saw growing up. Our lives are, after all, embedded in the physical world, so such physical artifacts of culture can also support the normalization of things that in hindsight may be kind of obviously harmful.
We might not notice that, though. That’s the point. We might not notice if many of the people we’re taught to trust are blowing smoke — maybe it’s a new kind of smoke, sublime and seductive — and blowing it right in our faces. Even as it becomes the air we breathe. Even if it catches in our throats. We still might not see it and feel it for what it is.