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Totalitarianism in Louisville

By Reeze Brighton

I specialize in the study of totalitarianism, especially, though not only, the communist variety. I find the subject fascinating, but I never for a moment imagined that any expertise gained in this field would prove relevant to American life.

Sad to say, it has turned out to be the most valuable subject I could have studied. The totalitarian temptation is not confined to Nazis and communists; it can rear its head in any society and gradually destroy it.

Where authority goes, collaborators follow with glee. Thus we have experienced the rise of a nonsmoking enforcer class, the “moral cretins”—of hectors and informers, people who cannot abide the presence of smokers even if they must use binoculars to find them.

26th District representative Ellen Call (R) is an example of an anti-smoking fanatic twisting reality with a most outstanding feature of the new virtue-mongers, her pretense to a painfully exquisite sensibility. Representative Call (R) has become a tiresome busybody who can't stop haranguing us with obscure data points like the fact that smoking is bad for you and that children should be fed and changed on a regular basis.

I am frustrated to observe the tobacco debate being monopolized by professional victims and prohibitionists. There seems to be little wisdom coming from Representative Call (R) on this issue.  Her nonsmoking enforcer status has become a hysteria.  A religious fervor that replaces the true morality issues and this shows the moral confusion that exists today with Representative Call (R) and the other members of Metro Council who replace thought with studies that confirm their biases and totalitarian temptations.

In his newest book, "June 1941: Hitler and Stalin" (Yale University Press), historian John Lukacs notes that Hitler, the original anti- smoking zealot, had a cigarette removed from a photo of Stalin that Nazi Germany circulated when it signed its non-aggression treaty with the Soviet dictator. Hitler felt it was bad for Germans to see such a "statesman" (Hitler's term) with a cigarette between his fingers.

As recently as 1982, the Postal Service issued a stamp honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt that showed a profile of the president and his trademark cigarette holder.

In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service released a stamp depicting the famous abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. The most famous photograph of Pollock, who loved to smoke, was a Life Magazine photo of him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The Postal Service used the photo, but digitally removed the cigarette.

In 2001, the Salt Lake City newspaper Deseret News altered a photograph of James Dean to remove an unlit cigarette from his lips. To its credit, once this doctored photo was exposed, the paper's managing editor told the Associated Press, "It was a mistake . . . We did want the cigarette to be less dominant, but when you start messing around with a picture, that's wrong."

Exactly. That's wrong. In fact, it's worse than wrong, it's totalitarian.

And those who loathe cigarettes don't care about what the anti- smoking zealots (again, usually folks on the Left) are doing to photos and films. But, as Shakespeare said about a rose, totalitarian behavior by any other name smells the same -- and that is a lot worse and a lot more dangerous than even cigarette smoke.

Americans can’t walk past a group of smokers without fainting?

Who’s kidding whom? The continuing efforts to manipulate smokers have little or nothing to do with health, but everything to do with malice impersonating its twin, virtue.

Assume, finally, that when this crusade eventually ends, the last person standing will be smoking.

Denying responsibility is a prelude to denying freedom. If smokers are helpless victims, tricked into nicotine slavery by a conspiracy of deception, it is presumably the government's duty to free them.

They can be free only if they stop smoking, and many of them will not stop smoking on their own. So they must be scolded, prodded, fined, restricted, and ostracized, i.e., Louisville Metro Council.

If they complain, saying that smoking is their choice and the government has no business interfering, it's because they are suffering from a slave mentality, a sort of false consciousness.

And that, too, can be remedied. 

By the way I never smoke!

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