Tea at Trianon: Make America Smoke Again

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, January 20, 2019

Make America Smoke Again

From Spectator USA:

The number of American adults who smoke has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded, a mere third of what it was 70 years ago. Decades of aggressive public health campaigns and advertising bans are responsible for this remarkable decline. As norms and mores changed, smoking became situated somewhere between bear baiting and regularly dining at Cracker Barrel as a form of utterly deviant behavior.

Those who continue to smoke belong to the struggle towns and junklands of Middle America. They are usually adult men without much of an education, living below the poverty line; they are the very backbone of Trumpism. Of course during the golden age of American smoking in the years after World War II, Marlboro men were just as easily found in Madison Avenue and Wall Street as they were in Texas Hill Country or Youngstown. Smoking – before its deleterious effects on health were properly known – was a truly egalitarian practice that bound the country together as much as compulsory civics education ever did. Big Tobacco even played a surprising and largely forgotten role in the emancipation of women in the 20th century. (Read more.)