I’ll begin this essay with a promise. This is my final posting on the topic.
And, an observation.
Thanks to New Albany’s Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ’08, I know conclusively that in spite of numerous personal differences, which I’m only now, this year, in the process of resolving, I am in fact my father’s son.
It may not seem like the sort of revelation designed to hang one’s rhetorical hat, but considering the year I‘ve had, it’s huge.
And if it means parting ways with my progressive brethren by sneering at orthodoxy, so be it. It’s healthier to sneer at orthodoxy than it is to dip snuff or smoke cigars, wouldn’t you think?
—
Several hundred people visit NAC on a daily basis. Among regular readers of this blog, there is a smaller, select group composed of true friends. Among this group, there are fewer still with whom I’m very close, and they know what a challenging year it’s been in my world. I’ll leave it at that, as background information.
Looking at it objectively, during the past month I’ve expended a disproportionate amount of time and energy in vigorously and vociferously contesting the city council’s smoking ban decision, and yes, that fact may seem counterintuitive to casual acquaintances, given that I’ve never smoked cigarettes, am not enamored of the odor they generate, and have little desire to be a pariah on my own side of the fence.
It’s just that the effete stench in this case isn’t emanating from an ashtray.
Furthermore, it certainly isn’t that I have ample time to devote to this particular struggle. Like many other people, I’m working two jobs: I’m helping my partners run our existing business, and I’m trying to start a second business. I’m serving on two volunteer boards. I’m married, and we own a home, and there are four cats and a 25-year-old truck in need of an oil change. The list goes on. Quite a few people out there have it far worse than me, and because I know that’s true, I’m not going to make it into a federal case, but if you haven’t owned a small business, you have no idea how difficult time management can be.
Or how much it pisses you off to be told that you obviously don’t know how to manage your own affairs.
—
Recently, the Bookseller asked me about my frequent disparaging of “out-of-towners” during this discussion. His unspoken question has been, “Why are you taking all this so personally?”
Fair enough, and I’ll try to explain why the professional cessation lobbyist’s comments during the last city council meeting grated on my nerves so thoroughly with each passing moment (lest we forget, many moments past the previously mandated “one”) that I felt compelled to speak aloud from my front row seat with reference to the unfolding travesty, and to remind the pusillanimous council president to follow his own stated “rule” … and to be ejected as a result of my insolence … and, just for the hell of it, what all this has to do with my father’s life.
At its most basic, I reacted the way I did out of pure instinct, because just like my father before me, I simply can’t resist throwing in my lot with the underdog, and as the smoking spectacle has stupidly proceeded, it’s become increasingly obvious that the truest underdog is the dude sitting on a barstool smoking a cigarette I’d never smoke, and drinking a beer I’d never drink, and probably watching a NASCAR race that I’d never watch.
Why do I so resent the presence of the paid professional anti-smoking lobbyists, the carpetbaggers from afar, and the associated health fascists who’ve descended on the city, then decamped just as quickly for further adventures in expense account living in other unfortunate burgs down the lonely Interstate from here?
It’s because they don’t have to do more than one thing at a time, while I don’t have the time to do anything, and what they’re being paid to do is intolerable from a standpoint of basic human fairness.
To me, they’re the health fascist obermenschen, these nannying, passionless people who are paid to perform one task and one task only sans the endless multitasking that fills my days, and that task is to demonize cigarette smokers, to the exclusion of anything and anyone else, and it infuriates me, because my fellow bar owners, who by the admirably frank admission of prime anti-smoking campaigner John Gonder must now cope with ground unexpectedly “shifting” beneath their feet, don’t have the luxury of spending 40-hour weeks defending their interests from predatory attack.
They’re peasants armed with mere sticks, squinting through the clouds at bombers cruising 20,000 feet or above … and the cluster bombs are hurtling through the air.
These bar and restaurant owners have next to no time to take away from their labor-intensive business creations, and no kneejerk lobby to level a playing field tilted against them from the start. They must scramble during rare off-hours to protect conditions that they genuinely perceive as important to their livelihoods, to rally their workers and customers (who’ve no time, either) to fight against something that was sprung on them without substantive warning, with not a solitary soul on a suddenly non-reactive council preparing them for the unexpected.
Just deft politics?
Pfui.
The speed of the council’s smoking represents cowardice by any reasonable definition.
Frozen in the headlights, with indignity piling atop indignity, and in the almost complete absence of clear public communication from the pro-ban bloc (how long will Jeff Gahan use his president’s chair as a shield from scrutiny?), these hard working business owners attended as many of the incredibly scant public hearings as possible, and were compelled to limit their comments to one minute, graciously complied in the main, and then were forced to listen with mounting frustration as they were lectured like dawdling kindergartners by Tim Filler, the carpetbagging cessation lobbyist from another city, who of course couldn’t possibly have any clear notion of how to run the businesses these people have operated on a daily basis, in some cases, for decades.
Want to respond? Sorry, suckers – you already had your minute … and by the way, Mr. Filler, just keep talking. Keep demeaning. Keep insulting. To hell with science. Just make these redneck bar owners look bad.
Mr. Filler, you can have as many minutes as you like to call honest people liars, to dispute their professional acumen, and to denigrate their comprehension of their own business, of their own interests, of their own customers – including that non-confrontational fellow on the barstool who wants above all else to have a few minutes away from it all, and can’t understand why we’re yelling about smoking when the street outside remains unpaved.
Detecting a wee bit of anger?
I won’t deny it.
—
It should make you angry, too, to have two sets of rules, and to have someone you’re never met speak with a theatrically straight face about your own inadequacies as an operator. Gee, how did I ever keep a business open for 16 years knowing as little as I do?
Anyone possessing a shard of empathy and a trace of solidarity with people engaged in the same pursuit as yours would feel the same way as I do, but this is different. This is the smoking “debate,” which manages to muddy the scrum comprehensively without my tossing buckets of water on the pitch.
So tell me, fellow fair-minded progressives, what part of any of this is fair to these extremely hard working people?
I may be a progressive, but what part of importing a for-hire suit to tell people they don’t know how to run their own businesses makes sense to you?
Why must smokers and operators be demonized in such a manner?
Wasn’t it supposed to have been about workplace safety?
Why did Jeff Gahan permit the “debate” to devolve into anarchy?
Why is John Gonder the only council pro-ban advocate to have basic human respect for the other side, while the other four remain as ziplocked as the barbecued bologna sandwich in Dan Coffey’s Bazooka Joe lunch box?
Take your time before you answer – but no more than a minute, because another important point that we’ve been taught by the smoking ban debate is that when it comes to social engineering campaigns undertaken by ward heelers, debate really isn’t necessary at all. Lip service to disposable principle is it, and nothing more.
Perhaps this oppressive absence of meaningful discourse will go down in history as the King Gahan Doctrine, and maybe we’ll be extremely lucky and the council will retain some semblance of a “progressive” bloc to enforce limited debate on slumlord abatement to the barest minimum necessary to appear civilized, but somehow I doubt it. Coffey will scurry when the time is right … and then what?
—
Why did it come down this way?
You see, neither that quiet guy on the barstool, nor the bar owner serving him, have anywhere near the lobbying clout that rental property owners have, and in the end, that’s why the pro-ban council bloc decided to schedule them first for the ritualistic ostracizing. It’s because sitting there, minding their own business, they couldn’t see it coming.
They were easy marks, and at a low, low price.
It’s because the out-of-towners would do the heavy lifting, the council members voting in favor would have three and half years for people to forget about it, and the socially unacceptable smokers with no organized resistance would be chased into the street to pitch their filthy nicotine-stained pup tents in the unrepaired pot holes that this council hasn’t had the guts to address, primarily because there’s no money, just like there’s no money (and likely, no will) to enforce the non-smoking mandate.
Y’all feel better about yourselves now that you’ve solved a purely cosmetic problem by disenfranchising people who did nothing to provoke it?
Not so fast, Jeff, John, Pat, Dan and Bob.
That question is aimed at my fellow progressives, not the council.
—-
And what of my dad?
My father spent his life chasing populist windmills, and most of the time he got burned, but his instincts were noble. He looked at any problem from the perspective of the guys like him, and guys like him were the underdogs, and yeah, while it’s true that I’ve spent most of my adult life distancing myself from getting hurt by believing in something so much that losing it would matter to me, sometimes I guess blood is thicker than water.
I asked the council why this, and why now? Gonder tried, and I appreciate it, but in truth, there has been no answer. Yet.
The Bookseller asked, why this issue and not another?
It’s because there’s something so repugnant about this, and that cuts at such a deep level, that I’m forced to do something I seldom sanction, and that’s douse the lights and start swinging. Sorry if it offends you. Like my dad before me, I’ll get over it … but not before I’m finished having my say.
We didn’t always get along, but my dad taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right. In my view, a smoking ordinance that purports to protect defenseless workers has achieved its aim only by targeting and vilifying business people and their customers, because in the end, at closing time, no one really wants to talk about science at all.
Science simply can’t be trusted to assuage individual prejudices, to scratch irrational itches, and to make us fear dying any less. At the same time, substituting one prejudice for another strikes me as hypocrisy of a very high order. The hypocrisy is what I’ll remember when I’m standing outside the building I own, smoking my cigar, and wondering if Sam will run again for the sixth in 2011 … and whether redistricting will have been achieved by then for the first time since 1992.
This hasn’t been a fair fight, and my dad taught me that fights should be fair, even if the outcome is preordained.
And that’s why I’m angry about it.
Thanks for asking.
Yes, I’m being feisty, prickly, disputative and contrarian about something that the majority of my own friends and acquaintances would prefer me to let lie and peacefully move on to other issues, but damn it, the more you see rigid orthodoxy enveloping you, the more someone – anyone — has to try to state an opposing viewpoint.
That is what I’ve tried to do. At least I’m open and fully transparent about it. Jeff Gahan and the council pro-ban bloc has chosen opaqueness and subterfuge. Let history be the judge of which has shown more integrity in the process … and I accept the verdict.
Just don’t limit me to a minute. That’s just plain insulting to an intelligence seldom valued in this town.
