Serious Answer: What is *my* opinion on smoking?
I can best answer this question with an analogy: Cigarette smoking is like Nazism.
No, this is not a reductio ad Hitlerum argument, and no, I'm not saying you're a Nazi if you smoke. And of course, I recognize that the two are fundamentally different, because cigarettes produce a biological dependency; nobody ever got addicted to Nazism. I'm talking here about the idea of each of these things. And it just seems to me that there are a few similarities between them that are kind of remarkable, when you think about it.
Everyone nowadays can agree that these two things are A Bad Idea. This is pretty much beyond question and beyond dispute. But these things are so universally reviled now, except among small and ostracized minorities, that it takes a bit of effort to remember that at one time, somewhere in the world, these things were each popular, normal, and predominant.
The really interesting thing is asking just why such a thing - which seems so bad to us now - could have possibly come in the first place to be regarded, by so many people, as good. Of course, neither enjoyed unanimous approval during its own time, even at the height of its popularity. But still, the fact that they could come to the positions of dominance that they did is a fascinating phenomenon from any historical, psychological, sociological, political, or anthropological perspective, a phenomenon which begs to be studied and understood.
Interestingly enough, there is a concrete link between cigarettes and Nazis, and his name is Edward Bernays. Bernays is considered the father of modern public relations, and he is best known for his book Propaganda (1928), of which Joseph Goebbels is known to have been a fan. Bernays worked as a consultant for, among other corporations, the American Tobacco Company, and part of his job there was to figure out how to make smoking more socially acceptable for women. Women were a theretofore largely untapped potential customer base, because for them smoking was still taboo, a sign of loose morals or otherwise questionable virtue. Bernays hired a psychologist, who conducted research into the reasons why women smoked, and found that these women viewed cigarette smoking as a way of defying oppression, a badge of equality and liberation. So Bernays staged a publicity stunt during the 1929 Easter parade in New York, in which a group of marching women lit and smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, waving them to the crowd as "torches of freedom." Later, when market surveys showed that women were reluctant to smoke Lucky Strike because the colour of the pack (green) tended to clash with their clothes, Bernays collaborated with a number of fashion designers to make green the "in" colour of the next season.
These are just a couple of examples of the manipulations that propagandists engaged in in order to push two very different, yet in some ways similar, kinds of ideas on an unsuspecting population. Some people collect memorabilia from World War II-era Germany, because that period and those events fascinate them. Some people collect old tobacco ads, ashtrays, and promotional items for the same reason. It doesn't mean that they approve of those things, or of the ideas and motives that produced them. Those things are simply intriguing artifacts of an era when the world went mad. These days, you'd probably get more flak for wearing a T-shirt with a swastika on the front than one with the Marlboro logo - but, in some circles, not by much. (Then again, in some circles, you might not get flak for either - which, I suppose, would be the scariest thing of all.)
As you may have gathered, I personally find the phenomenon of cigarettes interesting, for the reasons outlined above. Vintage ads are immensely entertaining to me because they are just so bad, so blatant in their hucksterism as to be laughable. As for the physical cigarettes themselves, I don't really enjoy smoking them; it's a pretty gross experience, and the base kind of pleasure that you get from consuming the nicotine drug isn't worth everything else that comes with it. This explains why it's something I do extremely rarely. Actually, I don't even know if it's accurate to say that it's "something I do," because I think that statement may imply a degree of regularity that just isn't present. Experimenting with smoking is something I got out of my system around the end of high school. There may be the odd time, at, say, a six-month-to-one-year interval, that I'll have a cigarette, but this is only when my judgment (and taste buds) have been compromised by alcohol, and even then I will immediately be reminded why I didn't pick up the habit in the first place (it's disgusting!). In short, nobody reading this should be worried about me becoming a regular smoker, or even a social smoker. You might, though, have to endure the occasional posted item featuring a brain-possessingly catchy Marlboro jingle from the fifties, or one that tells you how "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!" ;)
No, this is not a reductio ad Hitlerum argument, and no, I'm not saying you're a Nazi if you smoke. And of course, I recognize that the two are fundamentally different, because cigarettes produce a biological dependency; nobody ever got addicted to Nazism. I'm talking here about the idea of each of these things. And it just seems to me that there are a few similarities between them that are kind of remarkable, when you think about it.
Everyone nowadays can agree that these two things are A Bad Idea. This is pretty much beyond question and beyond dispute. But these things are so universally reviled now, except among small and ostracized minorities, that it takes a bit of effort to remember that at one time, somewhere in the world, these things were each popular, normal, and predominant.
The really interesting thing is asking just why such a thing - which seems so bad to us now - could have possibly come in the first place to be regarded, by so many people, as good. Of course, neither enjoyed unanimous approval during its own time, even at the height of its popularity. But still, the fact that they could come to the positions of dominance that they did is a fascinating phenomenon from any historical, psychological, sociological, political, or anthropological perspective, a phenomenon which begs to be studied and understood.
Interestingly enough, there is a concrete link between cigarettes and Nazis, and his name is Edward Bernays. Bernays is considered the father of modern public relations, and he is best known for his book Propaganda (1928), of which Joseph Goebbels is known to have been a fan. Bernays worked as a consultant for, among other corporations, the American Tobacco Company, and part of his job there was to figure out how to make smoking more socially acceptable for women. Women were a theretofore largely untapped potential customer base, because for them smoking was still taboo, a sign of loose morals or otherwise questionable virtue. Bernays hired a psychologist, who conducted research into the reasons why women smoked, and found that these women viewed cigarette smoking as a way of defying oppression, a badge of equality and liberation. So Bernays staged a publicity stunt during the 1929 Easter parade in New York, in which a group of marching women lit and smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, waving them to the crowd as "torches of freedom." Later, when market surveys showed that women were reluctant to smoke Lucky Strike because the colour of the pack (green) tended to clash with their clothes, Bernays collaborated with a number of fashion designers to make green the "in" colour of the next season.
These are just a couple of examples of the manipulations that propagandists engaged in in order to push two very different, yet in some ways similar, kinds of ideas on an unsuspecting population. Some people collect memorabilia from World War II-era Germany, because that period and those events fascinate them. Some people collect old tobacco ads, ashtrays, and promotional items for the same reason. It doesn't mean that they approve of those things, or of the ideas and motives that produced them. Those things are simply intriguing artifacts of an era when the world went mad. These days, you'd probably get more flak for wearing a T-shirt with a swastika on the front than one with the Marlboro logo - but, in some circles, not by much. (Then again, in some circles, you might not get flak for either - which, I suppose, would be the scariest thing of all.)
As you may have gathered, I personally find the phenomenon of cigarettes interesting, for the reasons outlined above. Vintage ads are immensely entertaining to me because they are just so bad, so blatant in their hucksterism as to be laughable. As for the physical cigarettes themselves, I don't really enjoy smoking them; it's a pretty gross experience, and the base kind of pleasure that you get from consuming the nicotine drug isn't worth everything else that comes with it. This explains why it's something I do extremely rarely. Actually, I don't even know if it's accurate to say that it's "something I do," because I think that statement may imply a degree of regularity that just isn't present. Experimenting with smoking is something I got out of my system around the end of high school. There may be the odd time, at, say, a six-month-to-one-year interval, that I'll have a cigarette, but this is only when my judgment (and taste buds) have been compromised by alcohol, and even then I will immediately be reminded why I didn't pick up the habit in the first place (it's disgusting!). In short, nobody reading this should be worried about me becoming a regular smoker, or even a social smoker. You might, though, have to endure the occasional posted item featuring a brain-possessingly catchy Marlboro jingle from the fifties, or one that tells you how "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!" ;)