29/08/2007 WE’RE BEATEN AND DOWN. WE’VE BEEN FLAYED AND THRASHED – OUR SKIN HANGS LOOSE IN BLOODY STRIPS. WE CURL ON THE FLOOR, FOETAL, BY OUTDOOR WALLS AND BAGS OF FETID GARBAGE. WE DON’T KNOW WHERE THE NEXT ASSAULT IS COMING FROM, BUT WE KNOW IT WILL.
Our attackers are relentless in their persecution, ferocious in their means and unforgiving of our every cigarette. They are the anti-smokers: now, they’ve succeeded in turning those who would harbour us, provide us room for a night and shelter from the cold, into criminals. They’ve banned smoking in public places and they think they’ve won. We can’t let them!
Smoking has been ingrained in British cultures for centuries, if not millennia. From the Shisha bar to the Teesside working men’s club, smoking has played its role in the havens where people escape from the empty toil that constitutes their worthless lives. These dens of iniquity are to lose a defining aspect of their atmosphere completely, a deeply saddening fact that is worsened when we look at the opposition more closely.
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These mercilessly healthy hounds, these anti-smokers, how they make us fear! How they chant their slogans at us, that smoking kills, that passive smoking kills! How they bombard us with figures seemingly guaranteeing the immediate, hideous death of all we love before eventually we will succumb ourselves! How they jam into our mouths the rotten lungs of smokers and pour the thick black tar of a thousand cigarettes through tubes in our ears!
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Enough! Let’s fight back with some statistics of our own:
NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON HAS EVER, EVER DIED FROM PASSIVE SMOKING.
There are no death certificates with the cause of death listed as environmental tobacco smoke, not one. Smokers dying of lung cancer? 99.8% of us will not. Does it upset no-one else that the World Health Organisation spends more money on anti-smoking campaigns than curing AIDS and Malaria in the developing world?
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We live in a society that is scared. We cower, waiting to discover which next dayto- day occurrence will be pronounced deadly by our new Gods, the Doctors, spouting facts from Science our faith to lead us to Health our Heaven. What is this society which has descended into such a fear of risk? Must we demand our every pleasure comes not only guilt-free, oh my fair-trade poseurs, but also risk-free? What is this ridiculous fashion? And what business is it of theirs if we smoke? Aside, that is, from their health products and services business.
It’s not just the smoking ban Notion wants to challenge – it just typifies this pathetic fad, this fear of nothing, this doomed pursuit. What is it that your vitamin supplements and your cod liver oil provide you that simple fucking food cannot? Honestly, quanti-fucking-fiably, how much better are you than us because of it? Why do you desire so much to become an Aryan Uber-mensch that you will condemn yourself to a life of anaemic pleasure? You strive against some future inevitability and forget the pleasure of your youth. And what was that pleasure? Once, it was the giddy glee of discovering the forbidden without knowledge of danger, like playing in spooky derelict buildings.
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In maturity, we suggest that pure, beautiful vice is the greatest source of pleasure, all the more divine for knowing the dangers of the forbidden and finding solace in that infinity of risk anyway. Every now and then, Health must go fucking scream into the wind – we need to not care about danger because it makes the pointless toil bearable.
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So let us praise vice for it is pure humanity! Let us build a society that acknowledges that we are human and so builds a place for vice because we need it sometimes. Let us respect the government that acts, not like the erroneous nanny slapping the cigarette from our lips and dragging us home by our ears, but who cares for us enough to regulate us. Let’s condemn the society that governs drugs on the word of obsolete science and puritan morality long since broken. And let’s just kill those who’d take the urge to vice and danger out of life because they obviously don’t appreciate living enough.
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See, Notion knows smoking makes us smell. It makes us cough thick streams of oleaginous brown phlegm into the sink. It might kill us. We dearly hope that our smoking won’t kill someone else. We’ll be considerate. But we’ll enjoy every damn fag. We’ll enjoy the romance of sitting in train stations with a fag and a book, imagining we’re waiting for a returning lover. We’ll love lying on our backs, in grass, smoking and looking at the sky. We’ll revel in smoking in bars because it’s illegal. We’ll smoke because it makes us happy, and we’ll smoke towards the revolution.
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