Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (18 page)

These latter are wildly over the top. There’s one picture of a carious mouth, a portrait of such dental horror that it must have been lifted from some mummy comic book.

If two-year-olds were ardent smokers, this campaign would have its perfect audience. Mix it up with a health-service warning from the tooth fairy and there wouldn’t be a two-year-old lighting up anywhere.

No, it isn’t the official stuff that cut down on the tobacco habit. It’s the frown of acquaintances, the increasing chill that ever-so-superior non-smokers send out to the last wastrel of their set who dares to take out the Player’s Light pack. It’s really very simple. Social opprobrium is the scourge that reforms. The only thing stronger than nicotine is the fear of friends’ disapproval.

Alas, reform is never a straight line. Just when it might be thought the art of inhaling was going the way of the hula hoop and the dodo, we have a report this week that there is something of a renaissance of pot smoking. Hemp is hip again.

Since 1994, the number of people smoking pot in this country has doubled. Even more impressive, a key component of the population—the very element most government campaigns are most urgent about “saving,” namely the young—has taken to pot with a vengeance. The same study also revealed that almost 30 per cent of 15-to 17-year-olds and 47 per cent of 18-and 19-year-olds used marijuana in the past year.

It went further, reporting—and I’m really glad to hear it—that “It’s easier to get marijuana on a school ground today than it is to get alcohol or cigarettes.”

(Just as a footnote here, I can’t remember when it was
ever particularly easy to get booze on a playground, but then, I grew up in circumscribed and difficult times. The Most Holy Rosary Parish School of Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, had few supplements to the basic curriculum, and tots of vodka or rum during recess were most definitely not among them. It might have helped. There were problems in trigonometry that definitely needed some form of remedial lubrication.)

I think what we’re seeing here is another illustration of that wonderful irony that goes under the rubric of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Peer pressure and remorseless rudeness (driving smokers out of doors) has whittled away at the cohort that looked to tobacco for a friendly lift during each day’s many mortifications. But vague signals of approval toward marijuana as an alternate solace, its much-hyped value as a “medicinal” tool (remember the tired line from every party, “I only drink for medicinal purposes”) and the official moves to decriminalize pot have worked to celebrate the mellowing weed.

No one is going to frown at a pot smoker. She may be mollifying a pain. She is certainly not to be branded as a slave to Big Tobacco. And just look at her teeth: they’re perfect. No mummy’s curse has scarred that mouth. And the young, bless their adventurous and experimenting hearts, know more than any others what is hip and what is not. Cigarettes are so passé. Besides, they offer no real mood change.

Come to think of it, this may be the real appeal of marijuana. As well as the comforts of addiction, a joint
offers a bland, smooth, edgeless few moments in a turbulent world. It puts a soft blanket over transient anxieties, suspends the critical judgment and enhances, beyond all measure of their intrinsic worth, the reception of some truly awful songs.

It is impossible to understand the popularity of some ancient bands and singers—the Mamas and the Papas, the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez (eech), Peter, Paul and Mary—without allowing for considerable numbing of the brain and a benign stupor that buried their dreadful lyrics beneath the radar of any self-regarding consciousness. The entire fame and popularity of Bob Dylan is only explicable on a similar subtraction of critical response.

I suppose the question that remains to be faced is whether the switch from one form of cigarette to another—pot is mainly smoked, and while RJ Reynolds may not be rolling them, joints
are
cigarettes—is a good thing. Do we have the same alarms about the second-hand waft from a doobie as we do from the less-noxious Export “A”? Are we to worry about the “passive relaxation” effect?

These are deep questions. They require meditation. Wind chimes, an old Cheech and Chong soundtrack, a few doobies and Health Canada beside us in the wilderness—we’ll figure them out.

The Cinderella City is about to enact one of the most comprehensive, ferocious, detailed and high-minded antismoking bylaws this side of Alpha Centauri. I am really glad to see this.

It’s been well known for decades now that Vancouver is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and further that it has resolved every major social and political problem known to man or metropolis. The Downtown Eastside, old-timers will recall, was cleaned up decades ago, and is now a most splendid housing-estate cum park, with a mix of citizens of every income and colour and culture—a true model to the world. Thanks to the forward-looking city governors of previous years, and their generous support of science and research into waste disposal, Vancouver’s garbage now evaporates, harmlessly, into the wide air as soon as it is placed on the streets. Garbage trucks can now only be found in the city’s famous network of museums.

Finally, where every other city in North America is a stifling box of car-packed gridlock and toxic exhaust, there hasn’t been a traffic jam in Vancouver since—let me see—about 1975, I think. The great monorails, the uncluttered bridges, the zillion bike lanes and the brisk, courteous efficiency of the city’s drivers as they zip, unimpeded, in their tidy little hybrids in and out of the downtown are the envy of every other municipal government on the continent. Shangri-La, thy new name is Vancouver.

So I’m glad the city council of that marvellous city by the mountains and the sea has finally gone to the mat, so to speak, on the last social scourge and only outstanding civic problem the city has.

Are the city’s proposed anti-smoking bylaws thorough, you ask? Let me put it this way: It’s just too bad there isn’t a Nobel Prize for Zeal, because, were there one, the civic fathers and mothers of Vancouver would be booking flights to Oslo even as I type their praises. The only failure in the bylaws, as I read the accounts of them, is that smokers are—not yet anyway—required to carry a handbell and sound their approach when they enter municipal boundaries

I especially like the bylaw for transient smokers. If a taxi is passing through Vancouver, neither the passenger nor driver may smoke—even if agreeable to both parties, and even if the taxi is licensed by another civic authority. This could be fine-tuned, though. Both the cab and its passenger could be defumigated at the city’s boundaries—it would be a pity to fustify an impeccable city.

Sidewalks, public buildings, bars, restaurants—well, you know they covered them. No smoking “within six metres of any entryway, window or air intake.” If you want to light up in Vancouver now, by my calculations the only legal spot would probably be on the median line of a major highway, or at the end of a long diving board extended from an apartment window.

But this is Vancouver. So let there be no surprise, as it approaches the sublime apogee of utter civic perfectibility,
that it was mindful—that even here, in addressing its last plague—it had to consider its dues to multiculturalism, plurality and tolerance for all.

Vancouver
will
allow hookah parlours. That’s “hookah,” in case you stumbled. There are, I read, three hookah parlours, which offer their glass bowls and water pipes to some of the city’s newer citizens.

According to the World Health Organization, “a typical one-hour session of hookah smoking exposes the user to 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette.” Now, any trivial inconsistency that nitpicking libertarians, or the live-and-let-live extremists, might have with this is more than trumped by the consideration that an hour on the hookah will combat “the depression common for newcomers” to the city. And if toking an hour on the hookah with two hundred times the volume of smoke from a single cigarette chases away the newcomer blues, well, hook up the hookah, toke away, I say.

Another petty glitch I spotted in a
Vancouver Sun
article suggests that “the one foggy point in the new bylaw was whether it will apply to crack cocaine and crystal meth smoking.” Picky, picky, picky. Crack cocaine and crystal meth? Bubblegum addictions. I’m sure the city council will get around to crack cocaine and crystal meth smoking when, and only when, they’ve reined in the jelly-bean rings on city playgrounds.

So, it’s a perfect set of bylaws. Accommodation for hookahs, a little ambiguity on the toy drugs of crack and
meth, but a steel fence of regulation—even for those just passing through—on the only problem left in the city that is the only unflawed diamond in a zirconian world: damned cigarette smoking.

Three cheers to Vancouver and its Committee for Public Safety. Now, I gottah gettah hookah.

There’s a paradox at the centre of the terrific animus toward George W. Bush. For his detractors, and they are legion and intense, the man is a cipher, a mere stand-in, for the real powers in the White House. A puppet of the functioning minds and stronger personalities of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and the outer ring of advisers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

He is simultaneously thought of as a bumbling preppy, an arrested-development delinquent, the prototypical frat-boy party animal, the kind of middle-aged man who thinks John Belushi’s
Animal House
is the only real film made in the last thirty years and whose idea of reading is a Tom Clancy novel—or, on less challenging days, the latest issue of
Guns & Ammo
magazine.

The indictment is scathing and thorough. George W. is an automaton of Pooh-sized mentality (“a bear of very little brain”) with the attention span of a slow-witted gnat,
the introspective capacity of a starlet and the mental agility of a stale Fig Newton.

His enemies scarcely credit him with doing his own breathing, and would comment that, if he
is
breathing on his own, he is surely not conscious of his doing so. He lucked into the presidency on the strength of his father’s name, a private fortune that was made for him by his friends, and the sheer, eerie incompetence of the Al Gore campaign. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that George W. Bush, on his own merits or as a consequence of his own actions, contributed to the effort that landed him in the White House and placed in his late-adolescent hands the exercise of the greatest power that this Earth has ever known.

That is the short and polite version—but such is the character of George W. Bush in the minds of millions and millions of people who actively detest him, among them some millions of his fellow-citizens.

Mr. Bush, in the account of his despisers, is a nullity, a nothing, a creature so limited in the resources of his person, his competence, his presence, that he is almost a non-being. Why, how does such a nothing stimulate so commanding an intensity and range of visceral loathing? The distaste for Mr. Bush is not a casual dismissal; it is passionate.

He inspires a sharpness of revulsion that people usually reserve for more personal antipathies: the bitterness of hostility following the reversal or despoliation of a cherished intimacy. If this Texan is such a perfect nobody, why does anyone care?

It is not because he is president, though that is usually the rationalization put forward: that, because he is president, and therefore has such power to do so many evil, stupid things, it is not only right to detest him, it is an obligation.

No, this line of reasoning is a kind of after-scaffolding for an emotion that has little to do with reason at all. Mr. Bush is loathed, first, in his own right—as a pickup-driving, nicknaming, inarticulate and haughty George Dubya. That he should be president just adds rocket boosters to the initial hate.

If he is, as a person, so innocuous, so unfinished and essentially trivial, what drives the anger and contempt of so many people? Part of an answer might be that, for those outside America, for whom anti-Americanism is professional or ideological, the projection of the person inhabiting the White House as little less than a fool and a stooge adds an extra fillip of insult and contempt to their career animosity.

For those within America who are fervidly anti-Bush, the same characterization offers them a proportionately larger and higher image of themselves. They are bigger because “Bush” is so small. Michael Moore, ludicrous, pompous and banal all at once, stands so much taller, morally and intellectually, when set against that dim caricature occupying the White House. The people who hate George Bush have a great deal of their own self-esteem invested in maintaining the idea of that upstart, vacuous, Texan dummy in the Oval Office.

By the reading of his enemies, George Bush does not have the personal force, the sustenance of character, to generate the enormous field of contempt and enmity with which he is surrounded. A vacuum doesn’t inspire hate.