What's All the Fuming About?

By RICHARD CORLISS

Time: the early 21st century. Scene: the First Church of Christ, Smoker, the only place where nicotine addicts can find sanctuary in a society that has declared their pastime illegal. Communicants file up to the altar rail for a long drag on a cigarette -- a precious, stale relic from the last carton of Marlboros sold before the U.S. government banned smoking in 1997. The priest blesses the faithful, they cough in response, and all exeunt to today's hymn, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

It could come to this. Smokers may soon need to organize themselves into an underground religion, elevating cigarettes to sacramental status, as the Mexican Indians did to peyote. For what was once a seductive pleasure is now an endangered cult, subject to demonization by the fuming, nonsmoking majority. "Like wars of religion," writes Richard Klein in Cigarettes Are Sublime, "the campaign against smoking lends itself to cruel fanaticism and self-righteous indignation." People who would never dare chastise a co-worker for his body odor or four-letter vocabulary will demand of a smoker, "When you gonna give up that awful habit?" or just "Put it out!"

Out it goes and, with it, the notion of smoking as a soothing arbiter of middle-class behavior. Like the loosening of a necktie, it signaled a relaxation into informality at the end of a meal or the start of a baseball game, before drinks or after sex. Even for the solitary steam fitter or housewife, the act of sending a geyser from mouth to ceiling could envelop the user in a penumbra of calm thoughtfulness. It was an empyrean for daydreams -- the cloud of smoke our thoughts went up in.

In popular art, smoking was always chic. Fred and Ginger, Bogie and Bacall, every gangster, gunslinger and G.I. used cigarettes to emblematize their suavity, maturity, grit. Kids loved the lordly caterpillar in Disney's Alice in Wonderland, purring, "Whoooo are yooooo?" while blowing his Alpha-Bits smoke rings. For the college set, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward R. Murrow were the patron saints of nicotine. F.D.R.'s cigarette, in a holder at a jaunty angle, proved him both a dapper patrician and a man of the people, while the . can-do bosses of the public weal sucked on fat cigars. Smoke-filled rooms gave us Social Security and the Marshall Plan. In smoke-free rooms we get S&L fraud and Whitewater.

All that was long ago, before the '60s -- from which all ominous changes can be dated -- rewrote the rules of American gesture. Such previously banal signifiers as handshakes and haircuts, comic books and pop music, became freighted with contentiousness. Soon Steve Martin was introducing politically correct comedy to the smoking debate. "Mind if I smoke?" he imagined someone asking him, then replied, "No. Mind if I fart?" In the '80s, even James Bond felt bad about smoking. Today the habit is excoriated -- antitobacconists depict Joe Camel as a schoolyard drug pusher -- and publicly survives only as a vestige of James Dean rebelliousness. Denis Leary's very funny pro-smoking rants are essentially ironic; taken seriously, they would come across as nostalgia for a life misspent. In the recent film Reality Bites, the one hint of Generation X bravado is that all the hipsters smoke and nobody cares.

In real life, smokers cannot pretend they don't care. They know they are plague victims and suspect they may be carriers. So they try meeting a censorious society halfway. They puff on their butts behind a closed office door, and indulge their health-nut friends by abstaining from cigarettes during the dinner hour -- which, without a nicotine fix, seems to stretch on for days.

But they cannot erase the stigma. Smoking is seen, and smelled, as an insult to civilization. It is also one of the few insults that civilization can forcefully address. The mannerly middle class may not be able to outlaw assault weapons or rap music or violent movies, but it can shove smokers (usually the working class, the minorities and the young) into the pariah class, right next to the serial killers.

These days, of course, even multiple murderers are treated to the panoply of psychiatric do-gooding. So are compulsive gamblers, foot fetishists and people who still like Meat Loaf. Cigarette smokers are virtually the only addicts who can't count on federal help or sympathy. If only they were hooked on booze, say, they could receive official succor for crimes even worse than fouling the lungs of themselves and their loved ones. We don't know of one husband who battered his wife because he'd smoked too much that night. We haven't heard of any fatal car crashes caused by a driver whose "one for the road" was a * Virginia Slim. Smoking shortens lives; alcohol ruins them too.

But no one will share smokers' illegal-alien status. Cigarette users must huddle in the ragtag solidarity of their serene, intense habit. Defiantly, they say, "We look so cool, don't we, waving our wicked wands in the air. Our voices have the knowing, late-night duskiness of alto-sax jazz. We pack more fun into life because we know, better than all those who stare darts our way, how short life is. We are nature's bravados, medicine's death-row aesthetes." As the health magazines remind us, absolutely everything can kill you. So smokers figure they may as well go out with a smile on their lips, a stain on their teeth and a wheeze in their outcast hearts.

Can we reach a compromise, O America of the New Prohibition? I'll light up a little less; you lighten up a little more.