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8 Name Your Poison Until early in 2008 I had a friend with whom I had once shared a good bit of common experience.He was exactly my age; we were both Vietnam War combat veterans; big smokers and drinkers, we had both enjoyed the bar and music scene when we were younger; we had both married and become late-life fathers, with daughters exactly the same age. On crucial “lifestyle” points as they used to be called, however, our patterns diverged. I quit smoking in 1979, scared to death by throat polyps. I quit drinking in 1984. My friend went on with both, ostensibly functioning and full of life. When I think of him, he reminds me of a picture from a weekend party or a beach trip, all of us with big smiles on our faces, a cigarette in one hand and a go-cup or a beer can in the other. He died this spring of lung cancer, the first lifelong smoker I personally knew from my generation who paid for the habit with the disease they said we would get if we didn’t eventually quit. Somebody with a cigarette and a mixed drink or a beer, along with a bunch of other people smoking and drinking, having some friendly fun somewhere in America: once upon a time, not too long ago, the average person, if not of some strict social or religious background, even if not personally a smoker or drinker, would have barely blinked at such a scene, which in fact looked pretty much like a magazine ad or aTV commercial. In terms of material wealth, post–World War II America is now rightly remembered as a golden age of consumer bounty, with favored massproduction items ranging from houses, cars, appliances, and fashions to 138 / Chapter 8 sporting goods, yard and garden equipment, books and musical recordings , and sundry other kinds of modern enjoyments and conveniences. Although appearing increasingly remote by twenty-first-century standards , comparable images persist for many people alive at the time of the glamour and appeal of two everyday consumer products, cigarettes and booze, once likewise almost universally accepted as part of happy living and widely advertised and promoted in all media as among the foremost civilized rewards of American prosperity. For anyone who chose to enjoy them, smokes and drinks just seemed to be part and fabric of the good life after the good war. Questions about the risks of tobacco use or alcohol consumption were regarded as obscurely academic or, when ventured in public conversations, the work of health nuts and blinkered moralists .The great American romances with smoking and drinking reigned supreme in post-1945 image and fact. “Got a light?” “Wanta drink?” Among the two most familiar wartime utterances, these were easy icebreakers , sometimes for a quick pickup but as often an opening to human connection and momentary respite, however brief and fleeting, from a world of terror and menace or maybe just regimentation and sheer boredom . In the world of postwar domestic culture they translated themselves anew through movies, popular music, radio andTV, and lavish newspaper and magazine advertising into irresistible invitations, openings into the happy enjoyment of the postwar consumer good life. “LSMFT. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel.” “Call for Philip Mor-ray-ass.” Everybody knew the advertising slogans and could name the big brands—Lucky Strike, Camel, Philip Morris, Chesterfield, Old Gold. Everybody knew who smoked what— family members, neighbors, social acquaintances, movie stars, and TV personalities. Cigarette brand loyalties in those days were like marriages, designed as a lifetime relationship, lasting as long as there was a product and a faithful legion of consumers still alive and sufficiently undiseased or uninjured to keep puffing away. All were straight tobacco, with filter tips only gradually a postwar innovation. There were no longer any ads with doctors in white coats claiming a certain brand was good for the throat or an aid to digestion. But any idea of “low tar and nicotine” at the time probably had more to do with advertising novelty than medicine. The American cigarette industry had gone to war. (In one case Lucky Name Your Poison / 139 Strike “Green” even floated the rather silly advertising claim by the manufacturer that it had changed the pack color patriotically because of dye shortages.) There it had done heavy service as a single small pleasure left in life, sometimes the last pleasure in life many...

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