Anti-smoking ads cause… smoking?
I’m not sure if Eric Olsen is being sarcastic here. The first thing I thought when I read this article was, “Oh, please.” Even when the tobacco companies run ads that are clearly anti-smoking, that go against their very reason for being and encourage people not to buy their products, it isn’t good enough for some people.
Then I remembered that this was a plot point in an extremely funny Christopher Buckley book, Thank You for Smoking. In the book a tobacco company consultant, before being kidnapped by clean lung activists, requests that an advertising agency make an anti-smoking ad less convincing. The agency runs with the request, and the final draft is deviously anti-anti-smoking while seeming just anti. First time as farce, second time as, err… Lileks would have thought up something funny to put here, dammit.
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Buckley’s book is one of the funniest I have ever read. In hindsight, it’s like what Tom Wolfe said about how hard it is to be a good satirist when you look at the absurd things that are said and done in real life.
I recall that Wolfe created the Sharpton-like figure for Bonfire only to have the real Sharpton appear around the time of publication. So it became a character satirizing Sharpton even though Wolfe never knew who Sharpton was until the book had gone to press.
Buckley’s book is similar. I think that the book had one of the MOD (Merchants of Death) squad argue in Vermont about how cheee was killing people as much as tobacco (or alcohol or firearms). What do we hear now about fatty foods, etc…
I was being both sarcastic and sincere in a pointedly postmodern manner.
Smoking is bad whether you are sarcastic or not. So butt out!
Rapmaster – Cool shit with the cheese. I don’t remember that at all.
Have you read Buckley’s collection of stories and reportage? I think it is called Wry Martinis, but I could be wrong. The story about his trip to an aircraft carrier was funny shit from some kind of 5th demension of funny.
Dawn – Smoking is one of the few things that I consistently enjoy, even on the dank, dark days.
Smokers do not gain a single positive thing from buying and smoking cigarettes. But tobacco companies make billions of dollars from their sale. That is the reality. If a smoker does not wish to see that reality and continues to desperately smoking one cigarette after the other, then they will suffer. Smokers say they “enjoy” smoking. What they rarely say is that they feel extreme anxiety if they do not have a cigarette, this anxiety sometimes becoming a blind panic. This is because they are stuck in an addictive cycle. Once they escape this addictive cycle they will no longer feel this anxiety. Many, many ex-smokers can testify to this. Sure, a smoker can sit on a plane for 24 hours without a cigarette – they have to, so they do, but that doesn’t mean they are not addicted.
When you are addicted to something which ruins your health and costs you a lot of money, how can you be benefitting from that? Sorry, I forgot, you enjoy it. Dream on.