Dialogue: Do-gooders' self-deceit on fringes of madness

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

The American cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris has published an economic report in the Czech Republic showing that tobacco is good for a country because people die earlier and thus money is saved in hospital and superannuation costs.

The company said it was making no case for smoking, simply offering what it regarded as sound economic information.

Good on Philip Morris, I say, because that's the sort of retort many public health fascists deserve. These officious officials have long been feeding the public spurious arguments about the extreme social liability of people who eat and drink too much or smoke. Smoking is a personal liability. Let's not hang the nation's indebtedness around their coughing necks.

And many officials have an authoritarian streak, such as that woman from Ash who warned us all that her organisation was pushing for censorship to stop what she called the glamorisation of smoking. The Government should stop any grants going to Ash if it continues to threaten my right to see films I want to see just because one or two of Ash's extremist members don't understand their role in life.

The job of public health officials is to warn us of the consequences of lifestyle behaviour that can be statistically proved to be dangerous or at least show a high probability of causing illness and death.

It is their job to forcefully present a campaign to warn people that smoking kills. When they overstep that mark and conjure up spurious arguments, they do their cause harm.

People who live in this society, smoke tobacco and don't know they're dicing with death must be living beyond the reach of all media or are deluding themselves almost to the point of insanity. If you tell them one lie or make one stupid threat too many, you allow them the pleasure of pretending the whole campaign is based on false propaganda.

Years ago the World Health Organisation published statistics that claimed smokers docked 12 minutes off their life every time they smoked a cigarette. I calculated on the basis of those figures that my chain-smoking dad died several months before he was born.

Mind you, I was strikingly reminded by a Holmes show item the other night that there has always been a premium on the common sense that prevents people from getting their causes out of proportion. The Bali Dog Foundation, this item explained, sought money to send veterinarians to Bali to save and restore to health the mangy stray dogs of the city.

Surprise does not come easily to me after all these years but I must admit I thought I was looking at satire when a pious young woman exhorted us to donate money to this cause. But, dammit, she was serious.

I would have been reluctant even to finance the more sensible course of having the dogs put down. It seems to me to be a small problem the Balinese should deal with themselves in a straightforward fashion. It wouldn't surprise me if these out-of-control do-gooders have to step over seriously disadvantaged children on their way to the vet's surgery.

The absurd sentimentality towards animals moves some of the animal rights people into areas of self-deception that border on madness. I think of a few lines by Yeats:

The rhetorician would deceive his

hp+1neighbours,

The sentimentalist himself,

While art is but a vision of reality.

When I was a kid, I lived in a small town with no veterinarian to spay the domestic animals. One day, after our cat delivered five kittens, my mother managed to give away two of them and the rest were put into a sack with a brick and I dropped them into the river on my way to school. This was standard practice then to avoid the town and countryside being overrun by cats. I wouldn't do it now because I wouldn't need to. Some people in those days put their kittens down with a spade and then buried them.

When I read recently of a woman campaigning bitterly against the wearing of fur, I wondered how these people make their selection of what animals to save from cruelty or death. "Save the ferret!" doesn't do much for me. Everyone parades to save the whale, a useless animal that ought to be big enough to look after itself, and thousands weep when one gets hurt.

Well, read this description of an animal and ask yourself whether it should be worth saving from pain and merciless mass slaughter by poisoning and bludgeoning: "Guided by twin oscillating gyroscopic compasses, driven by a propulsion unit developing fearsome power density, its wings controlled through a servo-mechanism by a control system of blindingly quick response time, this creature is the finest flying-machine of flesh or metal that our planet has ever seen."

Follow me! Save the housefly!