Smoke

By Crispin Sartwell

Here's my advice to you: smoke.

It has quickly reached the point at which that is the only means to preserve human autonomy and, hence, dignity.

The World Health Organization has instituted a new regime which will ban tobacco advertising worldwide and require cigarette packs to depict cancerous organs.

In Cannes, Nicole Kidman lit up at a press conference. Anti-smoking activists went postal."It's worth millions to the tobacco industry to have celebrities smoking," Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) chief executive Anne Jones told Australian Associated Press. "It's unfortunate that she smoked at a media conference that potentially went to hundreds of millions of people around the world."

The idea that Kidman's celebrated body is her own and not Anne Jones's now seems like the artifact of a more innocent age, an age in which we, rather than public health bureaucracies, had control over our the region bounded by our own skin.

These folks have managed to make smoking deeply wholesome.