June 1st, 2016
Over the past ten years, there broke a lot of scandals involving censorship of smoking in works of art or cultural objects. Sometimes they get absolutely absurd traits. For example, retouch photos of Sartre with a cigarette in the French National Library in 2005.
Sarcastic headline in the British press on this subject: “Hell – it’s the other who take your cigarette away.” Surprisingly, the pipes of Bilbo and Gandalf were not replaced by something more politically correct in the latest Hollywood film adaptation of Tolkien. Modern science has not yet learned to retouch very strong memories of smoking fathers and grandfathers from childhood.
Politicians have to repent of the sins of their youth and publically to give up smoking. Quitting smoking united for example Fidel Castro and Barack Obama.
Castro, who, like Che Guevara in the heroic era of the Cuban Revolution, rarely spent his days without cigars, posing for photographers, and to the tastes of whom there was even created the governmental Cohiba cigar brand, announced his farewell to tobacco in 1985.
In 2013 journalists overheard the joke of Obama in a conversation with an official from the UN: “I do not smoke for six years because I am very much afraid of my wife.”
Changing attitudes to smoking is an example of the most radical transformation of social norms in the last 100 years, along, perhaps, with the latest metamorphosis of the family institution.
Reducing the issue of health harm, both in practice and in theory demonstrates the intellectual laziness of smokers who could not fight for the language of the problem description and offer some alternative and clarifications.
And this is despite the fact that in the culture of the past two centuries, the process of thinking was demonstrated in close association with tobacco smoking. Pipes, for example were smoked by Herbert Hoover, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein.
And Sigmund Freud and Winston Churchill did not let their cigars out of the mouth. Modern research shows that maybe there indeed exists a positive association between smoking and the activity of the adult brain.
The fight against smoking begins at the moment when the Europeans brought tobacco from America, and that happened much earlier than the fight with the majority of other drugs. Obviously, this is due to the fact that the smoker can not be ignored and there should be developed a special cultural policy in relation to him/her.
