H.L. Mencken famously
defined puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. He might have been describing contemporary anti-smoking activists, that dour band of fuss-budgets constantly on the prowl for new ways to make life slightly less bearable by limiting the choices available to grown adults.
Incredibly, the latest push from
tobacco eliminationists doesnt involve actual smoking, which has already been driven out of polite society more thoroughly than Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermons, early David Allan Coe records, and
Threes Company-era gay jokes combined. But it does lay bare the prohibitionist mindset and its fixation on scrubbing the planet clean of any behavior or attitude the crusader deems unacceptable.
This time, the buttinskys are trying to douse the dreaded e-cigarette, a
device that supplies a safe nicotine hit to the user without bothering or endangering anybody else.
