Normally I can keep in check my rage against modern American Puritans, but that’s mostly because I live in Las Vegas, where vestiges of social freedom remain. When I venture out into Saudi America, I lose it.
America has become a land of moral pygmies — able to coolly tolerate the Surveillance State, the Nanny State, the epidemic of obesity, the murder and mass incarceration of blacks at the hands of the Police State, the fraud of corporate “democracy”, the subversion of The Constitution, but outraged like a ravished virgin if someone smokes a cigarette within 20 feet of the entrance to a non-smoking establishment in, say, Arizona.
To all of you Americans who support laws restricting smoking, just because you don’t happen to like the smell of tobacco smoke, among whom are many people I consider friends, I say — “Fuck you, fuck you where you breathe.” You are pathetic moral zeros who need to get a life. Now.
I love you — but you are pathetic moral zeros who need to get a life. Now.
Whew! I was afraid that Grampa’s jeremiad was going to end with “By Cracky!”
No — just a genial “fuck you” to the new American Puritans.
“Puritanism is the creeping fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.” — H. L. Mencken
Smoking is disgusting. Banning smoking is even more disgusting.
Other people’s vices, the ones one chooses not to indulge in, tend to be seen as disgusting and worthy of suppression. The vices one does choose to indulge in tend to be seen as acceptable foibles and in any case nobody else’s business. This has always been the logic of American Puritanism.