Book #79: Thank You for Smoking

Book #79: Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley

March 17, 2014


Smoking is bad for you. Duh.

That being said, I must confess that I am, myself, a smoker. A pack-a-day smoker, at that. I've been smoking regularly since I was 17. The thing that I miss most about Flagstaff, the town where I went to college, is all of the smokers. Between classes, walking down the street, on a break from a job...nobody batted an eye if you were smoking, and I made most of my best friends in college from just chatting it up while having a smoke. At my current university, I hardly see anyone light up, and I don't smoke while I'm on campus. As a teacher, I don't exactly announce my bad habit, since, you know, smoking is bad for you and I wouldn't want to encourage bad habits.

Now, this book that I am discussing was published 20 years ago (less than a decade before my very first cigarette). I know that things for smokers, publicly, have changed since then. In the book, they still have restaurants with smoking sections. Now, in most states, smoking is banned from all bars and restaurants; from any public place besides those that are designated at "smoke shops" (like a hookah bar). As Nick Naylor, the protagonist of the book suggested, the climate for tobacco has gotten worse. For all of the millions (nay, billions) of dollars that tobacco companies have spent trying to keep such measures from passing, they have been, for the most part, unsuccessful.

Nick Naylor never really acknowledges if he's really lying for the tobacco company. As a lobbyist, from the Academy of Tobacco Studies, he is supposed to paint tobacco in as positive a light as possible to the public. He's mainly on the defense, and at the beginning of the book, his job is in jeopardy. By the end of the book, due to some crazy events, he is now working for the anti-tobacco lobbyists. At that point, he does claim that he was telling "lies" for the ATS. But that's not exactly true, either, because now he's just lying for the other side of the argument.

Nick is pure Washington through and through. He is very slick, and is a master of reverse psychology. He claims that it is a lie when he tells people that he lobbies for tobacco because it's a "challenge," instead claiming that it's really for "the mortgage" (his ex-wife's, not his own). Is he really that greedy? As a guy living in a one-room place while making (at one point) $250,000 a year (in the early '90s!), he doesn't strike me as the materialistic sort. He appreciates nice things, but doesn't really strive to acquire them. He's really very simple: he does his job, he smokes cigarettes, he fucks women, and he hangs out with his buddies. His best friends are Polly, a lobbyist for the alcohol industry (who later becomes Nick's wife), and Bobby Jay, who represents a gun rights group (what, no friends from Big Oil?). They jokingly call themselves the Merchants of Death (MOD) Squad as they commiserate over their statuses as public enemies. I think that Nick takes smug satisfaction in his work, in being able to outwit his opponents in front of a live audience, or on national television, or whatever. The tide turned for him in tobacco, as I'll explain, and so now he's fighting with the other guys...a challenge in and of itself, but probably not such a big one (certainly not so hopeless), and one that will bring him just as much smugness and financial gratification as his previous one, and perhaps more security.

Okay, so as I noted, Nick's job is in real danger at the beginning of the book. His life is threatened when he appears on Larry King Live. This book had a jarring mix of real and fake celebrities (some real actors and politicians and talk show hosts mentioned, and just as many fake; why? Why not make them all fictional?) in this book. On the one hand, it definitely puts the reader into the '90s with the names being dropped, but on the other hand, I think that the descriptions of smoking in various public institutions do a good job of that on their own.

Anyway, Nick isn't concerned about the death threat, but his influential boss gets him some body guards. But Nick, smug bastard, plays a game of outrunning them in his car, and one day, he is kidnapped at gunpoint. The kidnappers, after putting a hood on him, proceed to stick him with nicotine patches...like 40, I think, which is,  of course, very dangerous. Nick almost dies...he's supposed to. But some cops find him on the streets, delirious, and he does survive, though he is shaken...and he is unable to ever smoke again (it was his body's nicotine tolerance that saved his life, actually).

Now, the kidnapping doesn't turn Nick around in his career. He's still all in for defending tobacco; in fact, his ordeal of being kidnapped by supposed "anti-tobacco terrorists" gets a lot of good press for his side. He gets a raise, and starts making a deal with a Hollywood studio to have smoking placed prominently in a film featuring two popular (fictitious) stars. I suppose that all of this sneaky placement of tobacco is supposed to be shocking, and maybe when this book first came out, it was. I know that tobacco companies have gone to lengths to advertise their products in sneaky ways. They're not the only ones who do this, I assure you. So nothing about what Nick was doing in this book was particularly surprising, when it came to his job.

The surprising stuff comes from the truth about the kidnapping. Turns out it was Nick's boss and his office fuck, Nick's competitor Jeanette, who had staged the kidnapping...using a hit man who had also killed multiple people who were suing the tobacco companies, setting them on fire in their beds. This is pretty dramatic stuff. His boss had gone to great lengths (like, beyond anything that any group lobbying for a product would ever really do, I'd like to think) to create good press for tobacco. Ironically, Nick, who was the one swept up in the whole thing (and who ultimately went to prison for "faking" his kidnapping, for the good of tobacco, but had his boss killed by the very man who had attempted to kill him), had been all for telling what I consider to be the real truth about tobacco. It's not a safe product. It can cause health problems. It doesn't always. I had one great-grandfather who died of lung cancer, and a great-grandmother who smoked most of her life and lived to 92. I have a grandfather who has smoked for decades; he and his wife are both doing okay (any health problems he has are related to his age and a genetic disorder, not smoking). I don't think that it's a guarantee that I won't suffer any health issues from it, but for the time being, I am taking my chances. I like smoking.

What's weird is that Nick doesn't reflect all that much on his life as a smoker when he's forced to quit. A couple of times, he mentions missing it. It makes me think that he wasn't a real smoker; smoking is a vital part of my routine. I don't have a cigarette all day long while I'm working, but as soon as I'm off work and driving away, I light up. I look forward to it as the relaxing close to my day, listening to the radio as I get away from work. Since I've been living alone, my smoking has increased. I very much enjoy, but I do feel ashamed about it because there is such a social stigma surrounding it. I don't feel bad for doing it because it's "bad for me," but because of the opinions of other people. Shit. Smoking just isn't cool anymore. So in that sense, Buckley predicted what would come to pass, as his talented tobacco lobbyist switched sides.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It didn't really offer me any insights into the tobacco industry. I always knew it was crooked, but not any more crooked than any other corporation, really. At one point, Nick points out how dangerous eating McDonald's is, and I said out loud, "Hell, yeah." And yet, they are definitely allowed to advertise to kids. So if tobacco has to be sneaky about advertising, that's just what they've been forced to do. I don't know why companies like Coca-Cola have to resort to that...