From: Michael Bywater <??????????????????????>
Subject: Re: Pipes Digest #186 -- April 15, 1995

Hi Steve.

First, let me say how much I enjoy the Digest, and thank you for doing a
fine job.

Second, about the general matters arising from this "Kevin" business... you
know, it worries me that the USA seems to be falling into what you might
call a Salem mind-set.  For example, there is a belief in a clear path of
righteousness leading to salvation (smoking being an outward sign of inward
disgrace, for example) and a profound suspicion of human relationships
(e.g., this terrible obsession with child abuse).

I know it's dangerous to criticise other people's societies, but, frankly,
I would feel deeply alarmed to be living in the USA at the moment.
Worrying about passive smoking or a man letting a couple of kids having a
pull on his pipe, when the country is in many ways in a worse state than
poor old Britain, seems to me like a man with a florid melanoma fretting
about a hangnail.  Perhaps it is a sort of dislocation: the real problems
are too great to contemplate, so people focus on trivia.

Maybe I have said this before here.  But, reading the Digest and a.s.m.
regularly, I keep coming away with this feeling that a nation which was
once an exemplar of individual freedom is becoming profoundly repressive,
and its citizens are allowing themselves to be coerced into submission.
Maybe it's as Yeats wrote:

        The best lack all conviction, while the worst
        Are full of passionate intensity...

Not forgetting (and relevant to the "Kevin" question) that the line
immediately preceeding those two read:

        The ceremony of innocence is drowned

When I was 12 years old, my Grandfather (RIP) introduced me to the
pleasures of the pipe: a ceremony of innocence, if you like, which I will
treasure forever. People _do_ act from simple motives; men _can_ love
children without any desire to abuse them; death is _not_ a punishment for
living badly.  And the desire to be fair and "non-judgmental" can lead in
itself to horrible abuses.  We have evolved, or been given by God --
whichever you prefer to believe -- the power of judgment, and to abjure
that power for fear of giving offence (or, more often, simply to avoid the
cacophony of axes being ground) seems to me lamentable.

I don't know whether this is the right forum to ventilate my concern. No. I
_do_ know. _Any_ forum is the right one; because, in the name of some
ill-digested salvation, we are being invited into a benighted age of
purse-lipped intolerance and condemnation in which the old benison "Smoke
in peace" seems more and more to require an introductory "Do you remember
when we could...?"  The anti-smoking movement is just a symptom of a far
more serious disease, which attempts to proscribe AND prescribe how adult
human beings may live.

Finally, a question of priorities.  Passive smoking is nominated as evil of
the moment.  How do its mortality and morbidity tolls compare with the
robbed, the beaten, the raped, the murdered, the abused, the mugged, the
maimed, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed who are victims of passive
drug-abuse?

But I suppose we baccy-heads are more amenable to the rule of law.  And
Philip Morris has an address where writs may be served.  Who do I sue when
a crack addict decides that I'm the one to get stabbed tonight?

Good for the politicians, eh?  It's like watching a man standing on the
stoop wrangling with the Jehovah's Witnesses, while the Manson gang has got
in through the kitchen window and is murdering the family.

Smoke in peace... insofar as you are allowed to.

--Michael Bywater

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Michael Bywater <??????????????????????> * London WC1
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