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smokin

24 Sep 2005

Hitchens, from an interview with Reason in 2001, on smoking, and a distinction between government authoritarianism and paternalism:

He [Ralph Nader] leads a very austere, rather traditional mode of life. I met him first about 20 years ago. He contacted me, in fact, as he’d admired something I’d written. We met, and the main outcome of this was a 20-year campaign on his part to get me to stop smoking. In fact, he even offered me a large-ish sum of money once if I would quit. Almost as if he were my father or my uncle. Yes, generally speaking, he is a believer in the idea that government can better people, as well as condition them. But he’s not an authoritarian, somehow. The word would be paternalist, with the state looking after you, rather than trying to control you. But there’s some of us who don’t find the state, in its paternal guise, very much more attractive. In fact, it can be at its most sinister when it decides that what it’s doing is for your own good.

I certainly wish I wasn’t a smoker and wish I could give it up. But I’m damned if I’ll be treated how smokers are now being treated by not just the government, but the government ventriloquizing the majority. The majoritarian aspect makes it to me more repellent. And I must say it both startles and depresses me that an authoritarian majoritarianism of that kind can have made such great strides in America, almost unopposed. There’s something essentially un-American in the idea that I could not now open a bar in San Francisco that says, “Smokers Welcome.”

Comments

Sarcastro — September 24, 2005 at 22:49 · reply

Did you catch Hitchens and Galloway on Bill Maher’s show last night? There IS something cool about watching the Brits argue.

cwage — September 24, 2005 at 23:46 · reply

There’s a funny bit from this interview with Hitchens where he talks about that:

After about 90 minutes of this cumulative testimony, Galloway was seated and sworn, and the humiliation began. The humiliation of the deliberative body, I mean. I once sat in the hearing room while a uniformed Oliver North hectored a Senate committee and instructed the legislative branch in its duties, and not since that day have I felt such alarm and frustration and disgust. Galloway has learned to master the word “neocon” and the acronym “AIPAC,” and he insulted the subcommittee for its deference to both of these. He took up much of his time in a demagogic attack on the lie-generated war in Iraq. He announced that he had never traded in a single barrel of oil, and he declared that he had never been a public supporter of the Saddam Hussein regime. As I had guessed he would, he made the most of the anonymity of the “senior Saddam regime official,” and protested at not knowing the identity of his accuser. He improved on this by suggesting that the person concerned might now be in a cell in Abu Ghraib.

In a small way–an exceedingly small way–this had the paradoxical effect of making me proud to be British. Parliament trains its sons in a hard school of debate and unscripted exchange, and so does the British Labour movement. You get your retaliation in first, you rise to a point of order, you heckle and you watch out for hecklers. The torpid majesty of a Senate proceeding does nothing to prepare you for a Galloway, who is in addition a man without embarrassment who has stayed just on the right side of many inquiries into his character and his accounting methods.

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