Well, apparently Australia, to get revenge on America for
winning too many swimming medals at the Olympics, has passed some new law to
keep innocent tobacco companies from seducing young children with their
hypnotically beautiful package designs. I think they’re going to force
cigarette companies to sell them in non-brand-looking packages or something.
And in those wonderful “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” and “woe is
us, you cheaters” traditions, today also saw lots and lots of demanding of
extra steps and hand-wringing from the two sides on the news, with the
anti-smokers crowd demanding graphic gore on the cigarette packages again, and
with cigarette people saying it’s no fair they don’t get to seduce people with
slick marketing and stuff. Or something.
Look, I know anti-smoking types want to guilt trip everyone
with the gory pictures, but this is not the right idea to stop people from
smoking, I’m telling you. Okay, first of all, those gory pictures just look
like the gross makeup from zombie movies, and as zombies are very popular,
everyone will want to be like the zombies, so they’ll smoke, hoping they’ll get
all gory looking. Next, isn’t it obvious that people don’t care about each
other or themselves by now? We’ve got people shooting and stabbing each other
all over the place, and people eating themselves into obesity like crazy: do
you really think warnings are going to work? No, there’s only one way to make
people take notice that might make some people quit, and it’s this:
Look, we all know most people, especially Americans, care a
lot more about cute animals than they do about people. Even movies that show
people being murdered, violated and mangled in every imaginable manner cannot
show a dog getting killed: people simply won’t stand for it. So what they
should do is say that cigarettes hurt kittens and puppies, with smokers
drowning them in second-hand smoke, etc. And then they can mandate a picture on
cigarette packs of a lit cigarette being put out on some puppy’s nose, or on a
little kitten’s head (don’t worry: it would all be faked!). Then maybe people
would care. Plus, it would be harder to buy and possess those packs of
cigarettes, because everyone would see the abused animals and gasp and sneer at
people carrying them around.
But this is only a partial fix, for many people who smoke
hate everything, so they might find it to be a bonus that their product is
harming baby cute animals, and they’ll buy up every last pack and smoke a
carton a day. But then we’d be rid of them sooner, so maybe it would be a
win/win for the anti-smoking crowd. Because, admit it, anti-smokers: you really
just want to kill them (smokers) all anyway, so why not just mandate they put more poisons in cigarettes, just to whittle down their
numbers? After all, the sooner anti-smoking activists just admit that they’re
murderous haters too, the sooner we’ll trust them and the more we’ll all take
them seriously.
