Over at the History News Network comes news of Dr. Robert N. Proctor, a historian at Stanford, who is coming out with a book on big tobacco (e. g. R. J. Reynolds/Nabisco) with the even-handed title, Golden Holocaust: A History of Global Tobacco. It seems that RJR/N is tying up Dr. Proctor in court to prevent his book from being published.

Ignorance of the manuscript’s contents and the tobacco company’s tactics prevents comment on the merits of this case. A cigar smoker, I have no obvious dog in this fight, except for the continuing condemnation of smoking as an evil comparable to National Socialism. (Where’s our Walter to claim for smoking that “at least it’s an ethos”?) The moral illogic of smoking bigotry is particularly evident in the following paragraph from HNN’s story:

We now know in retropsect, thanks to industry documents, that the tobacco industry is really two separate industries: one that we see, that makes and sells cigarettes, and the other we don’t see, that has spent generations and an untold fortune trying to convince the world, against our collective better judgment, that smoking is a normal human behavior and should stay that way.

Clearly, the reporter has not been watching HBO’s Madmen, where smoking is as natural to 1960s USA as moms, hot dogs, and apple pie (and where moms usually make apple pies while puffing on multiple cigarettes). Also clear is that the reporter has not considered how unnatural partially hydrogenated oils are despite how well they go down with a glass of milk and, for a time in American history, with a Lucky Strike.