Month: March 2012

Got Pissed off the other day (I know what else is new?)

In this case I was first annoyed, then irritated, then flat out pissed off and I really wasn’t sure why.

Part of it was that I was watching Television. (Almost always assured to make me mad)

Then it hit me… it’s the never-ending series of anti smoking commercials that play hourly in Los Angeles.

The first series of commercials were annoying…

They almost always showed a White person smoking. The first one showed a White man smoking in his apartment dressed in a wife beater reading the sports page. Then they follow the cigarette smoke through the vents in the building to another apartment where like an ominous demonic fog it surrounds a child of indeterminate (but clearly not white) ethnicity.

This commercial is an attempt to demonize cigarette smoking but it also does a wonderful job of re-enforcing the image of  a stereotypical White man. The subtext is that the White man is evil, he doesn’t care about who he hurts and he’s in cahoots with the demonic cigarette companies to kill all minorities.

This one annoyed me on a couple of levels.

A) The portrayal of the White man. If a similar stereotypical portrayal of a Black man, or Mexican man were to be shown on TV, there would be screams of racism from the ALCU, NAACP, LA RAZA, Jesse Jackson, Lou Sharpton, and god only knows who else. But for some reason White stereotypes are allowed. Just as gay stereotypes and gay people are still allowed to be denigrated on stage in comedy routines or in your local bar as a matter of common conversation. (You can’t have a person of Polish origin as the butt of a joke anymore but change Pollack to Fag and all the sudden it’s ok.)

B) Typically vents aren’t directly connected between apartments so it’s unrealistic to portray that smoke is going to move so easily between dwellings. You’d have the smoke cycled into a furnace or A/C unit so while I’m sure there would still be some particulates identifiable from the cigarette, I’m equally sure that you’d have far more pollutants from cars and busses driving by on the street outside the apartments. Those pollutants actually being sucked in by the A/C or Furnace air intakes.

The second commercial in the series shows a white woman, (although in later iterations of the commercial she is less white. It looks like her skin tone was changed digitally)  standing on her balcony smoking a cigarette. In this one we’re treated to the same demonic smoke effect. This time the smoke is  flowing down into the adjacent apartment where we see it pause over an ethnic baby in a crib. Once over the baby the smoke takes on a claw like menacing appearance. The tag line was something like “there are some people that can’t escape cigarette smoke”

This second commercial was as annoying as the first because anyone who smokes knows that smoke typically rises and dissipates.

Yeah… I used to smoke. I finally quit smoking in about 2000. It was tough, but the combination of beginning a workout routine and drinking water like a fiend really helped me make it permanent. I’d quit before for a couple of years but then I was in a bar, with a friend and one of his Benson & Hedges looked really good. That was when I found out the true meaning of “Slippery Slope“.

I still miss one aspect of smoking…

It’s that post fuck cigarette. I miss laying in the dark an ashtray perched on my sweaty chest and the rush of the first drag from a cigarette. I miss the glow of the end of the cigarette and knowing that my partner & I are going to fuck some more and I’m going to get off a couple more times before we crash for the night.

But I don’t miss it enough to start smoking again,  while I can write about it fondly I like breathing easily better.

The most recent set of commercials from LAQuits (Los Angeles Department of Health) are the commercials that really got me fired up and took me from annoyed… to PISSED off.

These commercials show people with emphysema. They’re on oxygen and they’re wheezing and clearly in a great deal of distress. I don’t know if these are real people or actors and I don’t care.

I find these commercials offensive in so many ways I can’t see straight. If I had to pick the top reason for my annoyance it’s this…

I visited my Father in the hospital when he was very much like the people being portrayed. I loved my Father, but I don’t appreciate watching TV and being taken back 20 years to my Fathers death, every 16 minutes.

I watch local TV for the News, and some entertainment (4 shows)… The rest of the time I’m watching DVDs or Netflix. So it’s surprising that a commercial like this would rise above my annoyance threshold.

The other night it seemed like every other commercial was of these people suffering for their next breath. All I could see was my Dad, lying in that hospital bed and knowing that he was going to  die soon.

Oh I’m not asking for pity. Nor would my Father. He smoked and he drank, and most importantly… My Father accepted responsibility for his own actions and the consequences of those actions. My father smoked pretty much every day of his adult life, and possibly well before he became an adult. He smoked Lucky Strikes, to this day I can’t see a package of Luckies without thinking of my Dad.

Yeah, I agree Smoking is bad. I say that as an ex-smoker myself, But… and this is a very important but. I believe that each and every one of us should be allowed to choose to smoke or not to. Moreover all of us must accept responsibility for our choices.

For those of you outside the Los Angeles area…

The small cities that make up LA have become little gestapo headquarters.  You can’t smoke in a bar, on the beach, within 1000 feet of a public entrance or exit to a building. There have been moves to prohibit smoking in apartments, and even within the confines of YOUR OWN HOME in certain cities.

Is this freedom? NO… This is a socialist state.

This is a small group of people deciding “For the greater good… we appoint ourselves messiah and will enact laws to protect you poor ignorant savages from yourselves.”

This kind of thinking is offensive for a whole bunch of reasons. The biggest deals with my belief in minor things like the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights. I know these are foreign and archaic concepts to a lot of people, but they’re important to me.

I went to the LAQuits website. I was going to post a simple little message asking them to stop airing the latest commercials and explain why… That was when I found that their web site didn’t even have a way to contact them.

And then… I GOT REALLY MAD! Which led to my writing this blog. I needed to get it out of my system before I tracked down the numbers for the LA County Department of Health. Where I plan to express my concerns without being emotional about it…

Hopefully!

—– UPDATE —–

After writing a polite letter explaining that I was offended and why… The Los Angeles County Health Department hasn’t responded (4 weeks now) . Not that I’m at all surprised. After all I’m just another evil White Man trying to oppress someone, somewhere, right?

Apparently I’m not alone in being offended. When I tweeted about my annoyance over these adds There were a few responses expressing the same feelings. These were folks that like me didn’t want to relive their loved ones passing.

Of course these anti smoking commercials are “For the Greater Good” So it doesn’t matter that people like me just aren’t watching TV anymore. I’ve seriously been considering discontinuing my satellite service for a variety of other reasons anyway. Being terrorized every fucking time I sit down to watch TV is just another reason.

Those of you in the rest of the country, are soon going to know exactly what I’m talking about. Apparently, the Federal Government is going to spend 54 million on a nationwide campaign. I figure that should help KILL the rest of public television in this country.