Most people don't remember cigarette commercials on television. President Ronald Reagan used to do them in the 1950's for Lucky Strikes, a non filter short brand known even by heavy smokers as Lung Busters. Luckies, as they were called, had some catchy slogans. One was L.S./M.F.T., which meant Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco. On the pack itself it said "It's toasted." I like this one: "So round… so firm… so fully packed… so free and easy on the draw." Very few people I knew smoked Luckies, mostly my friends' Dads, gruff types with deep coughs and lined faces. Honest, tough, no-nonsense guys who like a good laugh and harsh smoke

Lucky Strikes' direct competitor was Camel cigarettes, also short non-filters. They were pretty popular with men, not so much with the ladies, and they had their slogans too, like "I'd Walk A Mile For A Camel." This was years before they finally introduced Camel Filters and their cartoon spokesman Joe Camel that got people so upset because the ads were targeting youngsters. Well, no shit! If I was Dr. Watson I'd be praising their astounding sleuthing techniques. I never met anybody who started smoking when they were 47.

The king of cigarette commercials was The Marlboro Man, a real rugged looking Handsome Dan riding his horse over the Rocky Mountains in the snow while puffing away on a Marlboro or herding cattle in a World War II vintage open-top jeep on the Western plains. Marlboro was and still is the most popular cigarette on the planet but I doubt if it's because of the Marlboro Man, who by the way died of lung cancer. It's just a good cigarette, basically and also quite popular in China, where the Marlboro man doesn't invoke any national or cultural mystique for the Chinese. They just like to smoke and don't give a rat's ass what anybody thinks about it.

I liked the menthol cigarette commercials from the 1960's. They'd have a bunch of very hip looking young couples gathered in some swanky apartment in a skyscraper with a great view from it's giant terrace. There would be some guy playing stand-up bass in the corner maybe, plucking out some slinky jazz. A handsome man would offer a beautiful woman a cigarette and assure her it's cool and soothing, much better than her brand. She'd take a puff and then look at the guy like they were definitely going to do the wild thing tonight, then turn to the camera and say that this brand of smokes really is soothing and satisfying.

You never ever in real life met people like you saw in cigarette commercials, not the Marlboro man or the breezy hipsters in the million dollar apartments with their own personal jazz musician in the corner. As a matter of fact, the young rich hipsters weren't even invented until recent years with the rash of young internet millionaires, but those people generally don't smoke cigarettes. As for the likes of the Marlboro man, I expect he's not all that unique. America has lots of rugged outdooorsy types who ride horses, live on ranches and smoke cigarettes, although they are not quite the Madison Avenue-designed stereotype that Mr. Marlboro was.

After all, cigarette commercials, like any other TV ads, are not realistic and everybody knows that, including young people in their formative years. Does anybody really think that the glamorous booze advertisements reflect reality? Years ago hard liquor was banned from the airwaves, but not anymore. How about all those beer ads? They were always around and always targeted new drinkers. No sense preaching to the choir. Lots of kids drink, but not because of any new beer ad prepared for the Super Bowl or the cool Tanqueray Gin guy, but because they're kids and they do stuff like that. Some become alcoholics, most don't.

And some of them smoke, even though Joe Camel now sleeps with the fishes. Of course as always there's no shortage of teenagers having sex, a nasty habit that started back in the Bronze Age and shows no signs of slowing down, what with all those raging hormones and the powerful magnetic attraction between the sexes, two pesky mistakes made by Mother nature that no amount of regulation or self-righteous condemnation will ever stamp out. It just feels too good and feels so damned right. So who are we kidding here?

Kids find their Ecstasy pills and reefer and crack cocaine and heroin and metamphetamine pretty easy without the benefit of a single print or media ad. State lotteries have all kinds of commercials telling people they're going to get rich when any gangster who used to run these games before the states muscled in on their action will tell you it's a sucker's game. So you've got the booze, the beer and the gambling out there on TV impressing impressionable minds, so why the hypocrisy of banning cigarette commercials? They were quite surreal and kind of entertaining and not nearly as misleading as some of the prescription drug ads that are so popular these days.

These drug commercials would have you believe that Peace of Mind and Nirvana are only a dose away and they can cure diseases that nobody ever even heard of before these drugs were invented, probably conditions dreamed up in the offices of pharmaceutical conglomerates. I understand that some bozo doctors, no doubt for a hefty feel, decided that kids who shake one leg in class have some sort of syndrome that ought to be drugged away. Yeah, I know that syndrome, it's called being eight years old and bored out of your daydreaming skull in some stuffy classroom while some uninspiring underpaid drone of a teacher prattles on about adverbs. If that was really a condition then half of my own third grade class escaped diagnosis of this dread disease. Somehow we made it out of childhood. Cigarettes are really just one more drug, nicotine, and millions and millions of people use it daily, just like Paxil or Viagra or Lipator.

I'm not the only one who feels this way. My friend Ace from Arizona tells me they should bring back cigarette machines so a kid can still go buy a pack of smokes for the old man when he goes to buy him the newspaper. He doesn't smoke, by the way, he just doesn't like a lot of government-mandated behavior modification, figuring he'll decide how to raise his own damned kids by his own damned self, thank you very much. With the government making the most money off tobacco sales, many billions of dollars more than any tobacco company, he figures they're trying to pull another scam on us, the old tell us one thing and do another routine.

Ace is a bit of a contrary son of a bitch, which is probably why I like him so much. Hell, America was founded by a bunch of contrary sons of bitches.They asked a lot of uncomfortable questions and also figured that governments in general were too far up people's butts for their liking. Their thinking on governments was was basically this: I'll pay your taxes, fine, but don't search or seize my stuff illegally or tell me what I'm allowed to say or how to pray or what I can read or do in the privacy of my own home or try to prevent me from consorting with anybody I choose to consort with as long as I do so peaceably and don't arrest me without due process of law. You guys raise the army and navy, pave the roads and establish courts of law and we'll live our lives as we see fit.

And it worked out okay. All kinds of people doing what they want to do built one of the great societies on earth, even if some of us smoked, drank martinis or wagered a buck or two on the ponies. Look around this nifty place called America. Pretty impressive, no? It used to be even more majestic before we started trying to command the tides. I think success went to our heads and we developed a class of morons in this country who want to tell everybody else how to live, and I'm not talking about basic laws like the prohibitions on murder and theft and the like.

I'm talking about regulating industry right out of the country and trying to regulate morality to some nebulous norm, sort of like the old guy on the block who tells you you don't measure up but never exactly defines what measuring up means. This way he's always got room to criticize you no matter how much you improve. If you ever did "measure up" he'd have no purpose in life anymore and would dry up and blow away like an autumn leaf. I learned young in life not to pay the slightest attention to people like this since there's no pleasing them, not ever. Okay by me, I figure, I'm not here to try to please them in the first place. Life gives you plenty enough to worry about just as it is without having to factor in all the scold, killjoys and busybodies in the neighborhood. Nobody lives that long.

We used to make things here, real quality goods made by skilled, dedicated and well-paid craftsmen. Lots of these people smoked and if you questioned their right to do so they'd have laughed at you and lit up another one before turning back to their productive labors, much like today's Chinese people who now supply the bulk of manufactured goods to America. Coincidence? I think not. There was a time when newscasters and talk show hosts and their guests smoked, cigars or pipes on TV and no one commented one way or the next about it. Presidents openly smoked, and his cigarette holder was one of Franklin Roosevelt's trademarks, one of our greatest presidents.

Hell, everybody smoked everywhere and nobody cried like little girls about it, they just went about their own business instead of minding yours. The morality police have paralyzed a lot of things in this country, putting warning labels on everything from buckets(!) to hammers. If you need a warning label for a bucket or a hammer odds are you're not all that well-equipped to live outside of a carefully supervised environment. Maybe that's the morality police's goal, to make America into one vast cocoon where the full-time killjoys and finger-waggers can point out our every shortcoming and smugly correct us like we were petulant children. Where did that impulse come from in a country that won a World War in less than four years, put a man on the moon and and became the most productive industrial nation on the face of the earth? What's with all this cry baby bullshit?

You want to be safe from cradle to grave? Oh, don't put that factory near my house, it's noisy and ugly! Let's pass laws to chase them away so we can be safe and warm! Well that friggin' factory isn't near your house anymore, Pollyanna, it's in friggin' Shanghai! Feeling safer now? Is it far enough away from your house now? Well, I should hope so because those Chinese guys doing our old jobs all smoke! Well, if the Chinese ever get pissed off at America you'll have something else to complain about; the shortage of manufactured goods. And you won't be so safe and warm in the meantime while we rebuild our factories and retrain our workforce to actually make things again. So keep making little rules and passing laws to regulate every aspect of commerce and personal life and see what happens to our Grand Experiment of governing ourselves. The original mandate was to rule people's lives as little as possible and let our citizens run their lives as they see fit, each to
his own light.

But now smoking cigarettes is sort of a minor crime, so I guess the laugh is on our Civil Liberties. What about all the death they cause, you ask? Well, again I say, brilliant deduction there, Sherlock! You astound me! Next time you ask a stranger if he knows smoking is dangerous to his health ask yourself how stupid you really sound. Maybe you should apply for a job at the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious, you'd be a natural. Why is it when you approach a perfect stranger you don't first say hello or how are you doing? That's what you do when you're asking about someone's welfare or trying to make an acquaintance. Ah, but that's not your aim here, is it? You don't give a crap about this stranger or making new fiends, you just want to give him a mouthful of horse shit and feel smug. If you can make that person think less of himself, well, that's a job well done, by God! Just be thankful that smokers in general are tolerant people and don''t bust your lip
for your intolerable rudeness.

How about cars? They cause a lot of death. I don't see many car-free zones around here or labels printed in the side of every car warning of the potential for crushing yourself like a bug and maybe taking a couple of people with you while you're at it. Or wars? You'd think all these morality police personnel might have something to say about the dangers of shooting guns and missiles at each other and blowing up a lot of perfectly good houses with perfectly good people inside them, wouldn't you? But I'm thinking they're hesitant to chide people with weapons. Smokers are easier targets, I suppose, most of us armed with nothing more lethal than a satisfied smile and a Zippo lighter.

At least give us back our cigarette commercials so we can pretend that we're still citizens of equal standing with heavy drinkers and gamblers. We're a little tired of the only mention we get on TV being another new drug to help us quit smoking. Not a one of those commercials has a catchy jingle like "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." Or maybe these people want to pass more rules about gum chewing or crossing the street while speaking on your cell phone. Believe it or not, there is legislation pending on those two dastardly crimes in this country we still call America, even if only for sentimental reasons.}