Generally, it takes American perversions five to ten years to reach our shores.
This happens invariably and inexorably. The self-appointed leader of the free world mandates political correctness, homomarriage, reduction in greenhouse gases, reverse discrimination in favour of racial minorities or women, multi-culti rectitude, vegetarianism as a political statement – give it a few years and we’ll follow suit with obsequious alacrity.
The same goes for smoking. First, Americans banned smoking in all but specially designated areas. Then in all public buildings. Then in bars and restaurants. Finally, seven years ago, smoking in New York parks was deemed too dangerous to public health.
And what do you know, the Atlantic Ocean failed to provide a sturdy enough barrier for each ban to bless us with its eventual presence.
The latest of these is the proposed ban on smoking in city parks, which is guaranteed to become law in the next few weeks.
The British, however, have retained the last vestiges of sanity, which is why we aren’t making the patently deranged claim that a chap puffing on a Silk Cut in Hyde Park is jeopardising public health.
We don’t want every tobacco company to hire a regiment of doctors able to prove, convincing figures in hand, that someone who believes such nonsense presents a much greater threat to society than even clouds of tobacco smoke enveloping the Serpentine.
It’s so much safer to rely on an argument that, in defiance of logical positivism, can be neither proved nor disproved by any empirical method.
In this instance, the argument is that smoking sets a bad example for children, and I can see the point. Why rely on parks to teach tots rotten habits? That’s what we have schools for.
Children tend to go to schools much more often than to Hyde Park, and that’s where they learn all they need to know – or rather all that our powers that be think they ought to know.
Thus the little ones learn about French letters long before they learn the letters of the alphabet. The are taught that any judgement is wrong by definition because, by insisting on one postulate, we deny the validity of others that may be just as true. They are expected to express themselves long before they have anything to express. They grow up convinced that all religions are equally good, which is to say equally irrelevant. They… well, you can compile your own list.
Then they go home, and few are the parents who don’t pass on bad habits to their progeny. Mum and Dad swear, drink, fight, watch moronic TV shows, listen to music that isn’t music, eat food that isn’t food – and smoke.
That last bad example is set at a frequency that increases as we go down the social scale, but talking about this would set another bad example to be avoided. God forbid we teach children to say what’s true rather than what’s politically correct.
You decide whether smoking is the worst vice children could possibly imbue from the ambient air. My contention is that a brief walk through a London park (I have to plead ignorance of parks in other English cities) will expose children to many things that are a lot worse than lighting up.
For example, by listening to grownups passing by they’ll learn to talk with Third World grammar and demotic pronunciation. Yet we’re unlikely ever to see a notice saying “No glottal stops allowed beyond this point” or “No dropping aitches”.
They’ll see plenty of adults eating and drinking as they walk, which is rotten both aesthetically and digestively. So do we see injunctions against munching on the hop? Do we hell.
They’ll even – are you ready for this? – encounter many men wearing socks with sandals or women not wearing much of anything at all, and what kind of example does this set?
And let’s not forget men and women sporting facial metal and covered head to toe with tattoos. A child constantly exposed to such walking exhibitions of body art is likely to grow up with the aesthetic sense of a savage, and surely this is a worse fate than having one’s lifespan abbreviated by a few fags.
Music resembling elephantine flatulence interspersed with orgiastic gasps blares from ghetto blasters in every corner of our parks – what does that teach children? To be savages who are proud of their savagery? To pay no attention to those whose tastes may be different from theirs?
It’s frightening to observe how quickly the stupidity and amorality of modernity can degenerate into sheer lunacy, definable in clinical terms. A ban on smoking in public parks is a most clear-cut symptom.
Our society no longer needs just a good government. We need a good psychiatrist with an advanced degree and plenty of experience in collective madness.
Meanwhile allow me to offer a slight embellishment on our new ban. Before they pass through a park’s gates, children have to walk in the street: public transportation tends to stop some distance short.
Thus even on its own crazy terms the ban will miss the mark unless we also prohibit smoking in the street – along with smoking anywhere else where children could possibly observe it, emphatically including private homes.
Stands to reason, doesn’t it? But reason is off limits in the loony bin going by the name of modernity.