By BLAST BY SETH BARNES
If you’re a smoker, you’ve probably gotten the message at this point. You know, the fact that you’re a hideous piece of scum, a social leper who virtually needs to be followed at gunpoint by the government to make sure your insanely destructive habit doesn’t kill you and everyone in your immediate vicinity. You’re aware of all that, right?
Because if you aren’t, you have another thing coming to you. By the time you read this, the Santa Monica City Council will probably have adopted an ordinance that will ban smoking at virtually all outdoor venues in the city. All outdoor venues technically means the Third Street Promenade, bus stops, ATMs, movie theater lines, restaurant patios, service areas, farmers’ markets and areas within 20 feet of entrances, exits and windows open to the public. In reality, it means that you’ll have to build a bunker underneath your house if you want to have a smoke. The bonus here is obviously that in addition to suffering the ill affects of smoking a cigarette, you’ll also inhale all the secondhand smoke accumulated in your bunker and subsequently will be that closer to death so the rest of us won’t have to deal with you.
Santa Monica doesn’t seem to have this “enforcement” thing quite right. A vagrant loaded on drugs and booze can snag a gratis buffet meal in a park overlooking the ocean, pull his pants down, wave his genitals around, and defecate in front of hundreds of tourists with little long-term consequence. But Joe Marlboro can’t light up and diffuse the smoke of a cigarette into millions of square feet of open air?
I’m not a smoker, but I grew up in New Hampshire where the state motto is “Live Free or Die.”While this saying is often derided and mocked because of its heavy-handedness (if I don’t want to live free, will I literally die?) the civil libertarian in me appreciates the basic tenet of governance it conveys: I pay hard-earned taxes to support the government; it should interfere and override my individual freedoms only when the evidence supporting the greater good is conclusive and overwhelming. And in this case, the affects of secondhand smoke on the population at large are far from being well defined and conclusive.
Supporting the smoking ban, Nick Bott of the American Heart Association recently said, “Cardiovascular disease is the nation’s number one killer and second-hand smoke is a huge contributor. Three-thousand deaths a year are attributed to drifting smoke.” This kind of science just doesn’t add up for me. How exactly are we attributing those 3,000 deaths to second-hand smoke? Aren’t there other potential contributing factors influencing those deaths that would skew the scientific data? I’m no professional researcher, but assigning occasional short-term interaction with second-hand smoke as the primary cause of any death seems to be a dubious assumption at best.
The real problem we have is what I would call Delusions of Superhero City Council Grandeur. This affliction is not uncommon in our flaming liberal hamlet. This condition occurs when self-proclaimed Superhero members of City Council mistakenly believe they’re saving the world for the rest of us, forgetting their actual role as small-time, workaday, pencil-pushing bureaucrats. You see, City Council should be occupying itself with the nitty-gritty knick knack of everyday city governance: replacing park benches and manhole covers, appropriating funds for a Fourth of July parade, and deciding on the color scheme and design of police cruisers. Any dalliance with topics or issues of substantial national import should be strictly off limits. We’ve elected more learned, qualified people to deal with such concerns. Stay within the range of your expertise and talents.
Of course, this is a pipe dream in Santa Monica as City Council Superheroes regularly channel Jefferson and Washington in their quest to uphold the itsy bitsy ideas of freedom and liberty clamoring around in their progressive skulls. They legitimately think they are doing something noble and virtuous when they rail against the Patriot Act while condemning security cameras at the Pier and downtown. Memo to Superheroes: When the final verdict is leveled against the Patriot Act, the historians aren’t going to be combing through the minutes of the Santa Monica City Council. Not to mention that if one is going to err on the side of trampling individual liberties, it seems more appropriate to do so in the name of protecting public gathering spots as opposed to stamping out smokers. Why doesn’t City Council just stick to keeping the lights on and the water running, leaving the amateur analysis of American politics to talk radio?
Given my take on this issue, you can imagine my glee when I saw Councilmember Herb Katz’s remarks after the first “reading” of the smoking ban ordinance: “We always hear about these fears of losing tourism. So what? What is the value of human life? Let’s quit being afraid of losing money. Let’s get with it and start saving lives.”
There you have it, a City Council Superhero who’s going to save our lives! Not only is government going to intervene in our personal choices, they’re literally going to ferry us from cradle to grave extending our lives as long as they see fit.
Can you see the absurd pompousness of a small town legislator who thinks he (and he alone) has the ability to save citizens’ lives? What self-importance, what a deluded sense of self-worth. But then again, Superheroes have never lacked for confidence.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 26, 2006. Read the original PDF.