Smoking, nostalgia, and social deviance

Source: Fran Lebowitz on Smoking, ButzisAroma, 3:56, uploaded 2011-08-05, playlist index 17.

Fran Lebowitz starts with a question about the New York of her dreams. She imagines a city without tourists, then steps back from the usual claim that New York used to be better. People have said this in 1812, she says, and in 1719. The claim cannot always be true. Age supplies part of the explanation: Lebowitz was in her twenties in the 1970s, and being in one’s twenties is better than being in one’s fifties.

She still thinks New York was objectively better in the 1970s because it was less boring. Smoking helps explain what she means.

Cigarettes as an activity and an addiction

For a smoker, smoking gives even a dull situation something to do. Lebowitz treats this as part of the city’s former texture rather than as a defence of the habit. She calls smoking a strong addiction and objects to the moral language that treats it as a personal failure.

Her example is a trip to a Duane Reade at three in the morning during a snowstorm. She would leave her apartment in those conditions for cigarettes, though she would stay home for almost anything else. When the clerk tells her that Marlboro Lights are on sale, she cannot understand the logic. A sale is meant to entice a customer, yet she is already there under conditions that make enticement irrelevant. The cigarettes could cost a million dollars and she would still want them. Her comparison with a heroin sale makes the point in her own terms: the drug has already done the selling.

The social meaning of deviance

Lebowitz then compares the language used against smokers with language once used against homosexual people. She remembers the claim that homosexual people could not be around children, and describes the fear as a fear of homosexuality’s supposed secondhand nature. The comparison shifts the subject from health to social judgement. A behaviour or identity becomes dangerous through the stories a society tells about contact, contamination, and respectable conduct.

Her memory of gay bars supplies the historical scene. When she first came to New York, around 1969, gay bars were illegal, hidden in back rooms, and subject to police raids. People could smoke inside them. After a raid, she says, the names of all the patrons appeared in The New York Times, and each person lost their job that day because they were homosexual. She gives the examples of a cardiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital, someone who sold shoes at Bloomingdale’s, and a third-grade teacher at PS 10. The occupation did not soften the public judgement. Firing someone for being homosexual was considered respectable conduct.

The present-day image reverses the emphasis. Gay bars have plate-glass windows, valet parking, and people sitting where passers-by can see them. Smoking has moved outside. Lebowitz’s joke depends on the reversal: the identity that once had to hide is visible in public, while the cigarette has become the behaviour that requires removal from the room.

She makes the reversal personal. If someone had told her at fourteen that the behaviour she engaged in would later be treated as the most deviant part of her life, she says, she would have had a different adolescence. The line does not make smoking harmless. It shows how quickly a society can change the rank it assigns to different forms of transgression.

A prediction without evidence

Lebowitz says she owns more than a shelf of books by doctors describing homosexuality as contagious and deviant. She places those books beside the current claims about secondhand smoke and predicts that people will eventually admit that the data on secondhand smoke was falsified. Her last comparison is with car engines: if a small stream of secondhand cigarette smoke is as dangerous as claimed, she asks, what happens when a car engine starts?

The clip ends there. The prediction and the car comparison belong to Lebowitz’s argument, not to an established finding supplied by the source. The video names no study and gives no evidence for its account of historical firings, its description of secondhand smoke research, or its comparison between smoking and homosexuality. Its durable point concerns the moral language attached to deviance. The health claim remains an unsupported claim in this excerpt, and the two subjects cannot be treated as equivalent simply because Lebowitz places their public histories beside each other.

Further reading / references

• Martin Scorsese, Public Speaking (HBO Documentary Films, 2010), the documentary identified in the video’s description as the source of this excerpt.