The following is an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg’s new book, “Proud to Be Right,” a collection of essays by 22 young conservative writers.
In 2008, the year I graduated from Yale, April 20 fell on a Sunday. That was a problem for the Party of the Right. We had intended to hold our protest against the drug war on April 20, the traditional day, but cross-scheduling our rally with Sunday church ser vices would have cut our turnout in half. (If you don’t know the significance of the number 4/20 to the war on drugs, ask one in five American teenagers.) After some debate, the libertarians caved to the traditionalists and rescheduled Yale Conservatives Against the Drug War—aka “Tweed for Weed”—for the following Saturday.
Moving the date of the protest paid off. Even the more Right-wing Christians who weren’t exactly for weed showed up with signs that said THE DRUG WAR BREAKS UP FAMILIES. The rest of the Chris tians got the signs the libertarians had made for them: I COULDN’T PROTEST THE DRUG WAR ON 4/20 BECAUSE I WAS IN CHURCH.
It’s amazing in retrospect that the Party of the Right could be so ecumenical, given that we were split almost evenly between two ideological factions that should have been at each other’s throats. At one extreme were the anarcho-capitalists, whose ringleader was a Dumpster-diving mountain man from Idaho who spent his gap year teaching English in a Chinese whorehouse. (Fluent girls get better rates.) I shared an apartment with a couple of them the summer after graduation, and I can’t remember them ever toasting anything but “Smash the state!”
That same summer bred an interfactional romance not involving me, which led to the following exchange between my female housemate and her Glee Club director:
“The chip in my passport doesn’t work. Will that be a problem when we go to South America?”
“I’m not sure. What happened to it?”
“My anarchist ex-boyfriend microwaved it to free me from the state.”
Opposite the libertarians was a merry band of pre–Vatican II Catholics whose record at winning converts for Mother Church was so consistent that the POR soon got a not-entirely-flattering reputation for being a “Catholic factory.” I was one of these, and a religious studies major on top of that, although I can’t say I ever captured any heathen scalps myself. I watched most of the theological drama from the sidelines, occasionally laying bets on which souls would flip. On one particularly good Easter, I won two bottles of gin, but I felt so crass for gambling bottles of liquor on my friends’ salvation that I immediately invited over my newly minted coreligionists and the two losing bettors to split the winnings. At least once a month, someone from the Catholic faction would drink too much on Saturday night and oversleep the last mass of the day at five p.m.
When I wonder how we managed to have such party solidarity despite everyone’s ideological differences, I suppose that it was partly because our libertarians tended to be Southerners and Westerners who cared as much about manliness and personal honor as our traditionalists, and partly because our Catholics were more dissipated than our anarchists. I’m sure that the foxhole mentality of being conservatives on an Ivy League campus helped. But I think the glue that really held us together was the fact that, conservative or libertarian, we all smoked like busted tailpipes.
Fusionism was the theory. When I let two libertarians use the cover page of my Bible to roll some fine loose Turkish tobacco when they’d run out of papers, that was the practice.
It wasn’t just that nothing breeds mutual affection like huddling under a shop overhang in a New Haven sleet storm because Anna Liffey’s won’t let you smoke inside anymore. We smoked on principle. It was reactionary, libertarian, spiritual, and aesthetic all at the same time. Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein’s tribute to nicotine, was our Bible, because it had sentences like this: “When the religious dignity of smoking is completely obscured, we have lost a right to pray in public.”
That our tobacco habit had something to do with freedom should be obvious. We were lucky enough to have one bar nearby that still allowed smoking inside—the Owl Shop, a cigar bar—but the cheaper places hounded us out into the New Haven cold, in accordance with Connecticut law. During my four years at Yale, it seemed like every other week brought news of another city banning smoking in bars, which we took as proof of an incipient police state.
But it was never simply a matter of personal liberty, which, after all, wasn’t something the traditionalists always cared about. Most of us were in favor of banning prostitution, for instance, in spite of the libertarian mountain man’s assurances that all the prostitutes he’d met in China were the salt of the earth. Smoking bans bothered us because they gave the modern cult of health the force of law, which was more than we thought it deserved. The little joys of cigarette smoking—a moment of late-night camaraderie, an excuse to talk to an attractive stranger, just the right prop for an emphatic gesture, or simply a moment of relaxation at the end of a long day—these were all more important to us than health. There was something unappealingly technocratic about the state’s attempt to boil the argument down to heart-disease rates. Unlike the libertarians, we thought smokers should have to make a convincing case that the benefits of smoking in bars outweigh the costs. Unlike the Left, we thought unquantifiables like the way good bourbon mixes with a Marlboro should count.
The rest of the essay can be found in Jonah Goldberg’s Proud to Be Right. Helen Rittelmeyer is an associate editor at National Review.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
This is deeply, deeply retarded. But don’t sic your manly mountain men on me; I just used a politically incorrect term. That goes with bourbon and Marlboros, too, no?
Ha ha ha. Bwah hah hah ha hah!
You write like Dorothy Parker and William F. Buckley having awkward, thoroughly unpleasant sex.
What a delightfully funny essay! It is so refreshing to learn that stuffy old National Review has finally hired someone as young and as charmingly witty as yourself, Helen. Now, where was it that you went to school again, dear?
She went to Yale. I believe it’s one of New Haven’s better two-year community colleges.
As the “cult of nicotine” seems to trump the “cult of health” in our essayist’s worldview, I find myself daydreaming about the simple joys of smoking: phlegm filled morning coughing binges, smokers breath, the scent of stale cigarettes on the linens, premature wrinkles around the mouth and eyes…
But perhaps my most vivid memory of a smoker was the time I spent with my father, as I watched him die a lingering and thoroughly painful death at the age of 58 from CPOD and cancer, after a lifetime’s use of nicotine. Unquantifiables indeed…
Smoking bans bothered us because they gave the modern cult of health the force of law, which was more than we thought it deserved. The little joys of cigarette smoking—a moment of late-night camaraderie, an excuse to talk to an attractive stranger, just the right prop for an emphatic gesture, or simply a moment of relaxation at the end of a long day—these were all more important to us than health.
Don’t forget that “conservatives” are the ones who’ll oppose public medical coverage on the grounds that poor health is down to a lack of individual responsibility. Hooray for the wingnut ability to keep two diametrically opposed ideas in your head at once without feeling the dissonance!
Guess I’m old and out of touch, as I hadn’t noticed there was a big anti-drug-war movement amongst the young “conservative” conservatives. But then, I’ve always been more of a lone wolf, not a movement type. Now maybe you young could can work on realizing that WAR war breaks up families too ….
There is a strong correlation between certain psychological temperaments (specifically, the temperaments that moder psychiatry would label “ADD/ADHD”), radical/fringe views, creativity, and stimulant use. Brains wired to have a high need for stimulation sometimes like to get it through exploring ideas, sometimes through edgy art and music, sometimes through extreme sports or unusual sex or pain—and sometimes, all the above simultaneously.
Due to a nutritional detox program I underwent, I barely smoke these days. Yeah, I feel I’m slightly more boring for it, but my sinuses and voice are a lot better. If I do smoke, it’s American Spirits, the healthy cigarettes. (By the way, you hipsters in NYC, why aren’t you rioting like the French? When I was there this summer, American Spirits in the pack were like $13 in Manhattan.)
I kind of miss the flavored, perfumed, heavily adulterated Big Tobacco cigs, but I don’t miss the thought of putting many incomprehensibly-named chemicals into my system in addition to the tobacco smoke. (It would not surprise me, BTW, if it turned out the many additives, plus the pesticides sprayed on the tobacco, were actually to blame for the cancer, rather than mere tobacco smoke.) In any case, Spirits don’t fill me up with phlegm, whereas the last time I tried smoking a couple Big Tobacco cigs I suddenly coughed up a big sticky ball of it onto my arm. (I do sometimes find myself wanting one of those tarry Benson & Hedges 100s, just for old times’ sake … or maybe just a simple handrolled, with nice sticky Bali shag…)
What is it with pre-Vatican II Catholics? You guys are everywhere all of a sudden. How did Latin become so hip?
“Now maybe you young could can work …”
Ah, you know what I meant.
Super article.
I love all the health fascists revealing their “tolerance” for people with different behaviors and lifestyles (of which they don’t approve). I say, let’s ban fascists. They’re the true cancer on society. Let them taste a dash of the state-enforced violence they openly support for once.
When you contract lung cancer, I eagerly await zombie Ayn Rand coming out of her grave and giving you free chemo.
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