>I don't want to enter into the discussion about the cigarette companies,
>but I do urge Doug to refrain from citing the book about the sublime
>nature of smoking! The last time I visited my father's grave, I told
>him that cigarettes were sublime. He offered no response.
The fascination of the sublime is in its power to overwhelm or destroy us - in art, Shelley's Mont Blanc, Jameson's Hotel Bonaventure, or even, as Tom Weiskel argued in The Romantic Sublime, noisy rock and roll. Or in life, cigarettes. It's precisely their danger that some people find attractive. And the more they're demonized, the more people, especially younger people, are drawn to them. The attraction has nothing to do with the reasonable evaluation of risk/reward ratios. They're a way of flirting with death. This is something that public health professionals and mental hygienists don't understand.
Doug