It's been a bad few weeks for smokers. A bad decade, in fact. This is not news. But as the anti-smoking hysteria intensifies, the news becomes increasingly surreal. The first lady used a recent newspaper column -- did you know the first lady is a columnist, like her confidante Eleanor? -- to blast the movie My Best Friend's Wedding, because the lead character smokes. As Maureen Dowd pointed out in the New York Times, the character also lies, cheats, and manipulates the lives of other people to her own ends. But it was the smoking that Mrs. Clinton couldn't abide. The first lady, we've often been told, is a devout Methodist with a highly refined moral code. It has grown so refined indeed that the rest of us will have a hard time distinguishing it from an ad hoc collection of popular enthusiasms and fashionable punctilios. She aspires to be the era's Simone Weil, but she's closer to Madame Blavatsky.
A few days later word leaked out that her husband the president plans to ban smoking -- get ready -- not only inside federal buildings, but outside them, too. Federal bureaucrats who smoke, like every other American who smokes, have grown used to puffing away around the entrances of their buildings, since they can't smoke inside. This offends the president, himself the purveyor of a highly nuanced moral code. So henceforth smoking will be banned within some unspecified range of any building owned, operated, or leased by the federal government.
The president's new mandate calls to mind the story -- a true story, honest -- of the German businessman recently on his first trip to the United States. His host walked him around downtown Washington, and he was finally unable to contain himself.
"You have the most beautiful prostitutes here," the German exclaimed. "So well dressed!" Of course, he had noticed the throngs of women gathered on the sidewalk outside their office buildings, smoking. He'd gotten it exactly wrong, needless to say. In the great tobacco wars of the 1990s -- involving countless lawyers, tobacco executives, professional busybodies, and cynical politicians -- the people on the sidewalk are the only ones who aren't whores.