Final Draft

Cigarettes have traditionally been a driving force in shaping someone’s image. People who want to create an image of the laid back sophisticated urban intellectual; or at least that’s what it once represented. Today it takes on the role of the badass, cutting school and living the party life, but still a form of cool. So what is it that makes smoking so unique that it can represent the socially acceptable intellectual and the delinquent underage badass? Maybe both of those categories can fit under one umbrella category. Above the pack and distinguished; a cigarette says that I have a firm clear identity and I am living up to it. So therefore cigarettes fill a void of emptiness by solidifying an identity and proving independence.
Much of the cool image that cigarettes hold can be traced back to the glamorous 1950’s movie era. Actors such as Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and James Dean showed smoking as a symbol of masculinity while actresses such as Audrey Hepburn gave smoking a sensual and attractive. People love role models and those are some of the most influential people of their generation and cigarette smoking was a big part of their image and personality. People viewed these role models as people to shape their own personalities. People allow celebrities to shape them with misguided deadly devises because for many it’s a better option than having to come to terms with their own personality and their own faults.
Another thing to think about when talking about smoking is how it’s been able to keep its social acceptability. Even in the age where the link between smoking and serious health problems is beyond a doubt. For example our current President Barack Obama is a smoker even though in most states it’s illegal to smoke in a bar. Also its been widely shown that the health risks of marijuana are much less then cigarette smoke but using cannabis is still viewed as taboo by much of society. Truly something to be in awe of, a product that kills half its users gets taxed to death but can still hook one of the most well educated Presidents in the history of the United States. Now if that’s not cool then I challenge anyone to find a better example, because our sense of cool completely overrides our bodily needs which tell us that we should not throw something like that into our body twenty times a day. So in short cool versus health? Cool takes the prize every time.
So if we’ve already established that we’ve been sucked into this pointless exercise the real question is how did we get there and what were the tobacco companies able to do to get us into smoking? Cigarettes were first marketed as a product for the rich urban elite and were very expensive and were viewed as very white collar and sophisticated, but when world war two came around everything began to change. Troops were given cigarettes for free, starting a whole new generation out to look for the best smoke. The real driving force however has been the relentless and brilliant advertising done by the tobacco industry. The most famous and successful of ads was Philip Morris’s Marlboro man advertising with the catch phrase “Come to where the flavor is come, to Marlboro country.” Marlboro was conceived as a cigarette marketed towards woman because it was one of the first brands to have a filter on it, so after seeing sales continuously drop a change was done. Marlboro began to reshape itself as a symbol of masculinity. The cowboys ride into the distance as they light up a cigarette or the ladies watch in awe as a “Marlboro man” lights up a smoke.
So now that we’ve established the masculinity part to smoking what about people’s health? People may do stupid things to look cool but not in the same numbers as smoking. It would seem the remedy has been generational smoking and arrogance. The cigarette companies rely on people to do their advertising for them these days. A parent lights up a cigarette in front of her kid who then picks up the habit and starts smoking in front of a friend and so on and so forth. Everybody who starts smoking goes in with the mentality that “I’ll be fine, I’m going to quit really soon.” Well the reality is that it’s quite the roll of the dice, there are no guarantees, and the only guarantee out there is the likely hood of your survival drops every day.
Now the reason that I have been able to talk so much smack about smokers and the reason that they pick up the habit and how their suckers is because I am among the crowd myself. Now maybe it’s because I’m a big fan of old movies and such but it seems to go a little bit farther than that. I think that I smoke for the same reason everyone else does, it fits my role. Cigarette smoking has become a tool that I can use to project my image without ever having to say anything or even look at anybody. In a lot of ways the cigarette speaks for itself. If mixed with the proper attire and/or other physical traits you can tell someone more about yourself then you probably could in a simple introductory conversation.
One final thing that comes to mind with smoking is the actual physical act of smoking. I think simply that people don’t want to appear as though they have nothing to do. Smoking can appear as a buffer to loneliness. If someone’s outside by themselves smoking then the smoker is probably thinking that as long as I’m out here with a cigarette it appears as though I have something to do and I’m important. Also I think that the look of cigarette smoke has been planted in our brain as cool and even if you’re against smoking you can appreciate the mysterious look of billowing cigarette smoke.
To try and wrap this all up I think that we as a people have been not only feeding into this deadly habit but fueling it with our desires to reach the unreachable dream of euphoric cool-ness. Smoking went from Native Americans to the intelligencia through a transformation to something that crosses racial, economic and social boundaries. The only thing that John Wayne and Jerry Garcia had in common? A relentless smoking habit.