My OM chromosome is giving me some trouble these days. For those of you who don't visit your doctor with hypochondriacal regularity, the OM chromosome -- otherwise known as the "Old Man" gene -- activates at different times for different people. Mine kicked in some time during the last seven years. I can't pinpoint the date, but I know the symptoms.

My hair started to fall out. (Not a lot, really, but I look at the solar panel my Uncle has for his brain and I see the future of my hairline.) I started falling asleep in a chair in my living room by 11:00 p.m. on Friday nights. I woke up one morning and said to myself, "You know, all I really need from a car is reliable transportation." And I developed a penchant for muttering the phrase, "Kid's today," while pondering the idea that youth curfews might not be such a bad idea after all.

Granted, my symptoms are relatively mild. I anticipate at least another decade before I become a trembling, doddering old fool who shakes his gnarled fist at the gangs of hooligans who run past shouting "Go to bed, old man!" Still, like an epileptic strapped into a Clockwork Orange easy chair inundated with Entertainment Tonight reruns, certain things appearing in the magic box of my television just set me off.

One of these things is an ad campaign called "The Truth." You have probably seen these commercials, in which a gaggle of badly dressed children (none of whom appears over 20) live out fantasies in which they are capable of mounting precisely-timed, meticulously-planned, tremendously powerful demonstrations (complete with heaping piles of body bags and cringing Fat White Executives) to protest Big Tobacco and its Ministry of Evil.

You see, Big Tobacco, according to our ever-so-wise teens, employs commando squads of black-clad Algerian mercenaries who will storm your home, force lighted cigarettes into the mouths of your parents, your children, your spouse, your cat, your dog, your pet fish, and your Hummel figurines, then leave whilst cackling maniacally that you'll be dead in a mere thirty years of Hacking Black Vomitous Lung Plague.

I'd like to think I'm not alone in being offended that children who probably don't vote and who still live with their parents would presume to tell me what The Truth is. I'd like to think I'm not the only one who understands that choosing to smoke is an individual choice, one for which the individual smoker bears complete and total responsibility. When these sneering, pompous kids stare at the fourth wall of my television screen and repeat the phrase Big Tobacco again and again, I'd like to think I'm not the only one who realizes they are attempting to create a straw man, a bugaboo that divorces individuals from responsibility for their actions.

It isn't your fault that you started smoking, it was Big Tobacco that made you do it. It wasn't you who learned to overcome the discomfort of sucking warm, noxious fumes into your lungs; Big Tobacco held you down, pressed its black lips against your own, and exhaled. It wasn't your fault you ignored year after year of increasingly explicit Surgeon General's warnings; Big Tobacco told you smoking was good for you, and who were you to argue? It wasn't you who learned to suppress the urge to vomit after that first cigarette; Big Tobacco rubbed the back of your neck and encouraged you to keep on going so the your buddies wouldn't laugh at you.

I resent these commercials. I resent the insult to my intelligence that each advertisement represents. There is no such thing as Big Tobacco; there are only corporations that sell a variety of products, some of which are bad for you. Your job as a human being is to make choices about how to run your life. Some of your options are good for you, and some are not. YOU will have to learn to make choices that help you live longer and healthier. If you choose to partake of foods or beverages or substances that harm your health, that is YOUR CHOICE, which you make in this day and age with FULL KNOWLEDGE of what is or is not bad for you. (We will forget for a moment that every day the newspaper publishes the latest study about what is and is not good for your health, many of which contradict one another.)

Marketing and advertising are not endlessly powerful brainwashing tools. You, as a human being, have the ability to discern when you are being pitched a product. You, as a human being, have the ability to choose NOT to buy and use something, even if the advertisement features a cute cartoon character or a naked woman. That is life as a free individual: making choices for your own life, and accepting the consequences of those choices.

No one alive today who smokes didn't know it was bad for them when they started. No one alive today who smokes didn't have to suppress the urge to throw up the first time they inhaled a cigarette. IF YOU ARE ADDICTED TO CIGARETTES, YOU HAD TO WORK AT IT TO GET THAT WAY.

There is no Big Tobacco. There is only you, and your choices, and your ability to determine what is and is not good for you. Attempt to blame some mythical monolithic Evil Empire for your problems, and you wallow in the weakness and denial that characterize these commercials that presume to tell you "The Truth."

Choices that affect you and you alone -- like the choice to ingest something that will kill you, stupid -- are NOT the business of your government. Allowing the swaggering, arrogant, Hitler Youth mentality that pervades these "Truth" commercials to insinuate itself into our popular culture only validates the opinions of those who seek to control your life through intrusive government.

The most upsetting part of all this as that the current wave of advertising -- characterized by the unspoken sentiment of Find a Big Tobacco Executive and Beat Him To Death for His Sins -- is funded through an extortion settlement gleefully arranged through our hysterical legal system, which never met an abdication of personal responsibility it couldn't support. Suing a company that manufactures a LEGAL product because YOU CHOSE to use that product and were harmed by it is patently absurd -- and court cases of this kind set dangerous precedents for the future.

Responsibility for individual action begins and ends with the individual, regardless of outside influences. THAT is the truth. Inhale that, Big Government.

 

My friend David W. Pearson offered the following addendum on 1 November, 2000:

Something to note:

The "Truth" commercials that you have written on have another hilarious point that I wish to address. There is a specific commercial that does not deal with the protests that you have written on, however deals with a snot nosed kid in bad secondhand clothes that talks about messages on the web and it promotes their web site.

The nickname used by the so called teen writing in on the web is "420AGirl". I am amused to report (being someone who knows just a bit about the drug culture in the US) that the term "420" is a direct reference to the use of marijuana. There is a urban legend that "4-20" is a California police radio code that means marijuana use in progress. This is an urban legend, however the drug community has used this term as a code word for smoking dope......kind hypocritical when used in this commercial huh?

You can confirm the urban legend at www.420.com if you wish. It's all there.