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Life’s little pleasures are under assault. An army of health fascists is dominating our lifeworld; from our television screens to parliament, from the health department to our bars and nightclubs.
We are forced to live longer, it seems, repressively healthily, even though there will hardly be any pension and free health service for us when we call it a day and stop working for good.
Just as we started getting the first nicotine withdrawal symptoms while sipping a good old pint of lager in our clinically-smoke-free corner village bars, the European Commission tells us it will be using 72 million Euros of our taxpayers’ money to make us purchase cigarette packets decorated with grisly pictures of death and pain.
That is more than Lm31 million to be spent by our governments on images including those of rotten lungs and a man with a large tumour on his throat, stuck right next to the funereal health notices telling us that smoking makes your penis flabby and makes you die earlier than you ought to.
Ireland and Belgium are set to be the first countries to introduce these images next year, but judging by our government’s sudden nanny-state frenzy and its reputation of being more Catholic than the Pope, we should expect the Gonzi administration to set the example soon.
Thanks to the blanket smoking ban, we’re already experiencing this administration’s and its health department gurus’ doom-and-gloom, sanitised vision of the world, where a smoke in a cosy bar is prohibited and drinking in the streets is a criminal act.
It’s the typical moral crusade preceding every age of prohibition: pick a segment of society, label it, present it as a sub-human specie which is insensitive to everyone and everything, stigmatise it, tax it highly, moralise, moralise, moralise. It’s a tried-and-tested equation which gives government the political and moral platform it would otherwise not have to literally impose anything – from sky-high duty tariffs to the systemic segregation of society.
In this case, it’s about ‘smokers,’ as opposed to ‘non-smokers’ – two species that, until a couple of years ago, were non-existent in our social fabric, in the age when Public Health Superintendent Dr Ray Busuttil still addressed press conferences smoking a pipe.
A brilliant way to get free headline-grabbing publicity in these health-conscious days is to cry wolf about how we are drinking, eating and smoking ourselves to death. Sedqa and Mario Spiteri of the Health Promotion Department know something about that.
What really baffles me is that even some of the most pseudo-radical-sort-of-hippies I know do not even realise the absurdity of all this. They have no qualms about exalting Amsterdam and its fabulous coffee shops full of peace-loving marijuana smokers, but over here, nicotine smokers are just evil, destructive, death-wishers.
It’s already enough to be constantly warned that smoking does a lot of harmful things to you – as if it was the only cause of our inevitable death – but with these gratuitously offensive pictures, smokers will be ever more singled out for special attention. All in severe contrast to government insensitivity and unfettered progress as we’re surrounded by cancer-inducing chimneys, asthma-provoking power stations and lead-polluting traffic-congested main roads.
Indeed, why not stick pictures of the Marsa children’s rotten lungs on the power station’s chimney? It would fit nicely in the public health department’s gory circus.
Why not cover the St Luke’s Hospital incinerator with photos of cute little school children from Tal-Pietà suffering from asthma?
Why not put pictures of alcoholic youngsters vomiting to death on bottles of vodka, or of a man beating his wife with an empty bottle in an alcoholic frenzy, straight on a Teachers’ whisky bottle? Surely the government realises that alcohol has social consequences which nicotine doesn’t have, and they’re much worse for society than individual health problems, yet not one word of warning is written on alcohol bottles and beverage cans.
What about sticking some obese kids dying with cholesterol-clogged arteries on McDonald’s packages instead of those silly Pocahontas creatures or that idiotic Ronald clown in kitschy colours?
Why not paint car bonnets with crashed vehicles and amputated limbs?
And what about stuffing some models of overweight children dying of diabetes inside fatty Kinder Sorpresas?
So irrational is this moral crusade that government and its public health generals on the frontline are, perhaps deliberately, missing the full picture to launch their personal, patronising blitzkrieg.
Of course, smokers are aware of the risks they’re taking, as much as whoever loves our delicious traditional cheesecakes knows they’re full to the brim with cholesterol, although nobody greets them at tal-pastizzi to remind them of their imminent death (it’s always hanging, you know).
Go and show those pictures to the hard-working fisherman enjoying a smoke after a night on the high seas; to the builder taking a brief break in the dusty quarry amid thousands of other immediate health hazards; or to the stressed-out manager who just had to lay off hundreds of his own colleagues. We are all entitled to life’s little pleasures, every now and then, and if some over indulge, that is their problem and not the business of government.
Oh yes, some squeaky clean know-all will tell us that smokers are a liability to the health system, that we’re costing too much. Yeah right. Soon, in this age when even the air we breathe is about to be privatised, old age itself (once revered as the age of wisdom) will become a liability, a sickness that doesn’t even warrant a pension. Using the same argument, and standing by one of the health department’s own warnings, smokers die young, so they will definitely not contribute to the pension funds crisis.
We’d rather die happy than live an impoverished, long, boring life.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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