Totalitarian Amerika

If he had survived in power instead of putting a bullet in his head in a Berlin bunker, Hitler, a fanatical anti-smoker, would have sent smokers to the camps.

Shickelgruber would have been right home in today’s Amerika — the name he chose for his personal train, by the way — where anti-smoking mania is rising to Third Reichian heights. Reports the SFChron:

[Howard] Weyers, owner of a health care benefits administrator in Lansing, Mich., gave his 200 employees an ultimatum in 2004: Quit smoking in 15 months or lose your job. He refused to hire smokers. Ultimately, he extended his smoking ban to employees’ spouses and monitored compliance through mandatory random blood testing….

“We’re talking about ending an epidemic. This is a global pandemic,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likening Weyers’ approach to controlling an outbreak of disease.

What a shame that’s going on in my native state of Michigan. I just turned 53, so I grew up there when my parents and all my relatives smoked. I remember spending a lot of time in a bowling alley/saloon some friends of my parents owned in Detroit, before the government destroyed that once-great city. Everybody was drinking and smoking and having a great time. I was about 7 and didn’t mind the thick tobacco-smoke pall over the whole place — what’s now called “second-hand smoke” and is supposed to be more dangerous than the radiation at ground zero on Aug. 6, 1945, at Hiroshima..

Every now and then, one of the adults would give me a quarter to go to the cigarette machine — remember those? — and buy a pack of coffin nails to take back to them. That was before 45 years of inflation destroyed the dollar’s value, along with our liberties.

Nowadays, if you asked a kid to buy a pack of cigs, the parents would be jailed for “abuse” and the kid shuffled off to a foster-care home until he became a delinquent, was tried as an “adult” for peddling dope, then sentenced to life in the state prison.

But back then, parents trusted kids, and the government trusted parents.

My father smoked 4 packs a day — a habit he took up only when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in World War II — until he quit around 1961, yet he lived to earlier this year, reaching 90. Mom smoked a couple of cigs a day until she died last year at 87.

All real journalists smoke, as shown by the picture of the great H.L. Mencken, at right. Nicotine fires the synapses of the brain. And a slight nicotine buzz makes tolerable the follies we describe with our words.

And who’s this Gerberding yapping that my stogies are a “disease”? Wrong-o, doc. My cigars are a pleasure. Something we don’t have much of anymore since our free America has become enslaved Amerika.