It doesn't take a genius to look around this country and see that something has gone horribly awry. The past 25 years have produced a steady decline in every clever statistic you can shake a sociologist at -- we are a nation experiencing atrophy, a mass of overweight cynics with short attention spans and no savings.
Well, they say nature favors increasing entropy; the decline of the American empire was inevitable. No longer can we be the genocide-inflicting colonialist environmental butchers we once were, racist warmongers with a chip on our shoulder the size of Teddy Roosevelt's big stick.
And why not? What microscopic flaw in the American juggernaut has triggered our metamorphosis into a feeble country that ranks Kathie Lee Gifford as a greater hero than Martin Luther King (and Ronald Reagan superior to them both?)
That particular statistic may be made up, but all like fiction. It elucidates an important truth: America is going to heck in a handbasket. My father, a soft-spoken man trudging without remorse into his 50th year of life, has a theory about all of this. I know what you're thinking, every middle-aged man with a pension and a TV Guide thinks he's Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes these days, and I suppose my father is no exception, but I believe his theory is worth a listen. It may strike you as a bit odd the first time you hear it, but give it time, let it loll around in your brain cavity like a sociological lozenge, and you'll soon see its empirical truth emerge, or you might simply become schizophrenic. The responses tend to vary.
So what is this fantastic theory, you ask? The curiosity must be welling up inside you like a bloated trade deficit. All right, I won't keep you waiting nary a moment longer.
The United States of America has never been quite the same since it banned cigarette smoking in movie theatres.
Think about it: every time you go to the movies these days, it's a pretty stressful experience. Seats too narrow, slimy overpriced popcorn, candy that sticks to your fingers. You take that one last sip of soda from a cup big enough to carry NASA equipment in when an avalanche of ice explodes onto your face. The people in front of you or behind you or somewhere nearby chat away like the unemployed quidnuncs they are, mindlessly rambling about this actress' last film or how cute this person is or, worst of all, how the movie ends and isn't it romantic?
It wasn't like this in the old days, at least the way my father tells it. Only the little kids bought popcorn or candy, and it was reasonably priced, too. Of course, the increase in prices has little or nothing to do with smoking bans, but the two events have been synchronous, which is coincidence enough to frighten any legitimate paranoid.
Back then movies were a much more relaxing time. You didn't feel the need to prattle to your neighbor -- if the movie bored you. You just lit up a Camel or a Marlboro and puffed happily away, a pale white symphony emanating from your mouth, lustrative ether dispersing into the air. Everybody smoked and nobody talked about lung cancer or emphysema; there were no Surgeon General's warnings in the good old days. No, back then you could smoke your cigarette with pride and ignorance.
Smoking a cigarette during the movie mellowed you out, desensitizing you to the hollow tripe that comprised the bulk of American movies. How do you think people tolerated "Gigi?" Believe me, it wasn't because of Maurice Chevalier. People went to see "The Sound of Music" seven or eight times. Every time Julie Andrews would break into that pining wail of "The hills are aliiiive..." you could light up your Winston-Salem and wait for it to end without the slightest hint of stress.
Now those days are gone, and their carefree self-destructiveness gone with it. Let's face it: if you can't smoke in a movie theatre, you might as well have white teeth and pink lungs. The simple pleasures are gone, my friends, regulated and investigated away. Yet violence and bigotry and corruption and poverty continue to flourish in this decrepit nation of ours.
Our acceleration is increasing. My father quit smoking 15 years ago.
And we know what's happened since then.
