How I Learned to
(Almost) Love the
Sín Lobbyísts

A couple of years ago, while wondering with some desperation what to write about, I turned on the TV and there was a nice-looking talking-head lady from the Tobacco Institute, manfully (as it were) denying that there was any scientific link between smoking and cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, or athlete’s foot. She was attractive, well-spoken, intelligent, and as persuasive as she could be, given the deplorably disingenuous data she was pitching. I thought: What an interesting job that must be. Get up in the morning, brush your teeth, and go and sell death for a living.

A few days later I was reading in the paper about some teenage kid who, to judge from his blood alcohol content, had drunk two kegs of beer single-handedly, then got in his pickup truck and careened over the yellow line into a minivan, annihilating an entire Boy Scout troop. And there at the bottom of the story was a quote from a spokesman for the beer-keg industry saying what an awful tragedy it was, but that no one was more concerned about teenage drunk driving than the beer-keg industry. I thought: Boy, I bet that guy trembles every time his beeper goes off.

A few days after that, a “disgruntled postal worker” went bonkers and blew away his supervisor and a half dozen others with a gun with a name like Hamburger-Maker .44 Triple-Magnum. And sure enough, the National Rifle Association was right on the case, worrying out loud that if we start outlawing Hamburger-Maker .44s, how long before we outlaw the Swiss Army knife? I thought: There’s another interesting job.

The idea formed of writing a major, thick, serious, nonfiction study of institutional hypocrisy in America. It would be grandiose and groundbreaking, but with an accessible title: I’m Shocked—Shocked! (said, of course, by Captain Renaud in Casablanca, on being handed his gambling winnings moments after closing down Rick’s Café for gambling). The book—no, the volume—would cover government, business, society. It would be comprehensive, exhaustive, thorough. And boring.

But I kept coming back to these three yuppie Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Another title came to me: Thank You for Smoking. And then the mortgage bill arrived, so that settled it.

I wrote to the Tobacco Institute, the various liquor lobbies, and to the National Rifle Association. These were artfully worded letters announcing that I had had enough of the neo-Puritanism that was sweeping America and was embarking on a book about it. True enough. They may now complain that they were deceived, but if they look at those letters, they’ll see that they really weren’t—and anyway, people who make their living pushing cigarettes, liquor, and guns ought not to claim the high moral ground. And they shouldn’t look a gift novel in the mouth: The trio of characters who make up the book’s Mod Squad—it’s an acronym for “Merchants of Death”—are sort of likable. Or at least sympathetic.

Likable? Yuppie mass murderers? Or mass enablers? Sympathetic?

I went to see the attractive lady from the Tobacco Institute. She was very nice and … tall. I don’t want to get into amateur psychology here, but my guess is that it’s not all that easy being a six-foot-one-inch-tall woman, especially as she had no doubt reached this height in her teens; and maybe, just possibly, there’s some anger inside that she’s still, uh, working out. (But it wasn’t my business, and I didn’t ask.) I was surprised, however, to learn that her previous job had been at the Department of Health and Human Services. “At my going-away party, they were going to give me signed copies of the Surgeon General’s report,” she said, smiling, “but thought better of it.”

I wanted to know what it’s like, being a merchant of death. I didn’t use that exact phrase. Well, she said, it’s not easy. No, I said, I imagine it’s not. You get threats, she said. What do you do about them?, I said. You throw ’em away, she said.

Once she was at a health symposium—that’s part of her job, attending health symposiums; what a warm welcome she must get—standing next to Everett Koop, the formidable former Surgeon General who looks like Captain Ahab. And someone mentioned that she used to work at HHS. And he said, “I wish she’d gone to be a prostitute on Fourteenth Street instead.” Don’t think that didn’t hurt.

I said, How do you introduce yourself to strangers? “Well,” she said, “you never come straight out and say, ‘I work for the Tobacco Institute.’ ” First she’ll say, “I work in public relations.” If they press, she’ll say, “I work for a trade association.” If they still press, she says a trade association “for a major manufacturer.” She added, “You never know if this guy’s mother has just died of cancer.” By now I’m shaking my head in sympathy, thinking: Gosh, it must be just awful.

But why, I fumbled diffidently, what’s—

“A nice girl like me doing in a place like this?” she finished my sentence.

“Yes!” I cry. “Why?”

She exhales her smoke—like Lauren Bacall. “I’m paying the mortgage.”

Of course: the Yuppie Nuremberg defense: I vas only paying ze mortgage! I admire this woman. In the kingdom of the morally blind, she has the echolocation of a bat. On the way out, she points to a booklet on her credenza. Next to it is a packet of “Death” brand cigarettes, an actual brand of cigarettes, no name on the front of the pack, just a white-on-black skull. As tchotchkes, the Tobacco Institute could do no better than a pack of Death cigarettes.

But the booklet. It says, “Helping Youth to Say No to Tobacco.” She says, “That’s what I’m proudest of.”

This was an impressive statement. My admiration for her faculties of cognitive dissonance, already large, swelled to even greater proportions. Goebbels might as well have produced a booklet entitled “The Führer and the Jews—A Love Story.”

Oh dear. I promised that I wouldn’t moralize. It’s not my job as a novelist. It’s just that I have kids myself and … well, no, back to the story.

Much in the news at the time was the controversy about Old Joe, Camel cigarettes’ famous dromedary with the nose that seems to remind some people of a penis. Camel started a new campaign with Old Joe at its center, wearing sunglasses and playing the saxophone, shooting pool, coolly eyeing the chicks. RJR Nabisco was putting out about seventy-five million dollars’ worth of Old Joe ads a year. The cigarette companies say that they are not—repeat, not—trying to get new business. They say they seek only to reinforce brand loyalty—and brand disloyalty, trying to get a teeny, tiny percentage of smokers to switch brands.

In the wake of the Old Joe campaign, Camel’s share of the illegal children’s cigarette market climbed from .5 percent to 32 percent. Outraged mothers howled. Even Advertising Age, Mammon’s own trade journal, editorialized against the Old Joe campaign, to little avail. Old Joe is still among us, playing his saxophone.

Meanwhile, overseas, the U.S. trade representative had begun to bully Pacific Rim countries—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and others—into opening their markets to U.S. tobacco. Up till then, those countries hadn’t allowed cigarette advertising. Then comes the U.S. trade rep threatening something called a 301 action, named for a section in the 1974 Trade Act that allows the president to slap retaliatory tariffs on foreign products if their country of origin is seen to be discriminating against Marlboro et al. by not allowing Marlboro et al. to advertise—never mind that no cigarette advertising has been allowed.

Inevitably, the countries buckled to U.S. government pressure. The happy result? In just the first year that South Korea allowed U.S. tobacco advertising, the smoking rate for male teenagers rose from 18 percent to 30 percent. For female teenagers, it rose from 2 percent to 9. The trends were similar in the other countries. The World Health Organization estimates that between now and the end of the century, smoking will kill 250 million people in the industrialized world. That’s one in five, roughly the population of the United States.

So it’s clear that the tobacco industry is doing its level best to help youth to say no to smoking. I left the Tobacco Institute lady’s office feeling warm and fuzzy.

My next new friend works for the Beer Institute. The Beer Institute! I come to him straight from a visit with the head of the hard-liquor lobby: the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. They hate each other, the beer and the booze people. Why? Because of a tax issue called “equivalency.” If one beer and one highball contain the same amount of ethanol, well then, say the DISCUS people to the government, you should tax beer at the same rate you tax us. This makes the beer people—Augie Coors, especially—very unhappy. So I do not tell my beer people that I am bellying up to the booze people.

My beer guy—what a guy! Good-looking, jockly hail-fellow-well-met. He is calling me “guy” and we have only known each other for ten minutes. On his desk is a recent copy of Fatal Accident Reporting System, a Department of Transportation publication. On the bookshelf: beer steins, empty bottles of exotic beer. On the wall: his diploma from the Summer School of Alcohol Studies. I yearn to ask, Do they know how to party at the Summer School of Alcohol Studies, or what? There is also an autographed photo of him and his wife and President Bush.

He works hard. And with a handicap. He hates to fly, and yet he used to have to fly one million miles a year. Once, he was on a plane that got struck by lightning. He drank fifteen drinks to calm down. After that he got so nervous that he had to get himself drunk to fly. “Which sometimes leads to trouble,” he allows.

He gives me a tour d’horizon of the beer world. It is not a pretty picture. Sales have been basically flat for ten years: Neo-Prohibitionism is on the rise. Hypocrisy is rampant. Congressman Joe Kennedy II is demanding yet more warning labels on beer bottles. You know it’s bad when a Kennedy is staking out the moral high ground on alcohol.

“We pour millions into traffic safety issues each year,” he says. And what thanks do they get? None, nada, rien, zip, zilch. Ingrates. We discuss the government’s “Controlled Availability Theory,” the idea that if you tax something, people will buy less of it. He quotes Himmler: “We must get rid of the alcohol.” He adds, “That’s not an exact quote.”

I follow him to a health symposium called Healthy People/Healthy Environments 2000. My beer guy says that he sort of “relishes” being at the conference. He says it’s “like being black in the Old South.” I will hear variants of this as I shuttle between my alcohol, tobacco, and firearms people: They are the new pariahs, the niggers of postmodern morality—the victims. The DISCUS person, gray-haired, grandfatherly, and aggrieved, will crack the faintest smile when asked about the effects of neo-Puritanism on his social standing and will shrug, “It’s not quite as bad as being a Colombian drug baron.”

My beer guy gets up and speaks to the healthy fifteen hundred. They sense the presence of the enemy. Fifteen hundred bottoms—three thousand buttocks—shift warily in their seats. You can hear them clenching.

It is called buttlock—gridlock of the indignant. They do not like him. He is … unwanted.

He looks like an Eagle Scout up there. He pleads earnestly, “All we’re looking for is some input.” Can’t they see that? It’s all he wants, input. Just a little input. “We’re not saying we in the industry should control alcohol policy in this country, but for Christ’s sake”—he smiles when he says this—“give us some input!”

At the National Beer Wholesalers’ Convention in a few weeks their banners and lapel buttons will say it loudly: “WE’RE PART OF THE SOLUTION!” And they are! Drunk driving is down 40 percent since 1982, but you don’t hear that from the Healthy People. “It interferes with their funding needs.”

He is finished. The applause defines politeness: over in less than a nano-second. The next speaker, from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, receives applause befitting Schwarzkopf ticker-taping up Broadway. I begin to appreciate what my beer guy is up against: a massive, tectonic moral shift, spearheaded by a phalanx of pissed-off acronyms: MADD, SADD—Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Students Against Drunk Driving. P. J. O’Rourke, booze muse of the open road, wants to form an organization called DAMM: Drunks Against Mad Mothers. My beer guy loves P. J. O’Rourke. So does my cigarette girl, so does my gun guy. So do I.

We descend the hotel escalators into the exhibit rooms, where the individual groups that form the body Healthy have set up their booths. It is just like any trade fair. My beer guy says, “We’re sort of shocked that they’re even allowing us to exhibit here. They were very specific that we could not give away free products. It was a real interesting discussion,” he chuckles, “about what we could and couldn’t do with that booth. It was their worst nightmare that we’d have a couple of kegs tapped and some trashy trinkets like bottle openers.” He laughs. Animal House. A toga party. To-ga, to-ga! He is hearty, my beer guy. Which is really what you want in a beer guy.

Together we walk down the aisle between the booths. It is to walk a gauntlet. I keep my reporter’s notepad well in view, like a shield, so that they will not mistake me for a beer lobbyist. You would not want to be mistaken for one yourself, walking past displays from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Trauma Systems Associates, the Mid-Western States Substance Abuse Committee: Facing Alcohol Concerns Through Education. Their display shows the Coors ad girl altered so that she’s pouring a pitcher of beer down the toilet. He shakes his head and says, “What a waste.”

There is the National Head Injury Foundation booth. He says they’re “okay” but adds winkily, “We usually define the good guys by who’ll take our money.” We then come face to face with another of the enemy, and here is more evidence that God is a bad novelist. She is a nice lady, in charge of Washington D.C.’s anti-drunk-driving initiative. Her name is Pam Beers.

On we go past the National Highway Safety Administration, the New Hampshire Concerned Citizens Against Drunk Driving. They have caught on to the quilt thing: Theirs is inscribed with the names of all the kids killed in drunk-driving incidents. “Chipper, We’ll Always Love You.”

Does this crack my beer guy’s heart? Not. In truth, he didn’t even see it. We have arrived at the Beer Institute’s booth—no Spuds Mackenzie, no Swedish bikini team, instead a model of sobriety and educational material. Signs proclaim the 39 percent decline in drunk-driving fatalities between 1982 and 1990. A slogan urges, THINK WHEN YOU DRINK. A lonely color poster proclaims the photographic glories: a frosty mug surrounded by mountains and valleys of fried chicken, burgers, ham, and pizza.

But what’s this? The booth next to the Beer Institute’s is … the National Coalition to Prevent Impaired Driving. My beer guy grins wickedly, “They’re going to be sooo pissed.”

What does the novelist make of all this? As much as he can, I suppose, while straining—straining—not to turn his director’s chair into a seat of judgment. Anyway, who’s to escape whipping in this crazy, mixed-up world? An ethical man, said Twain, is a Christian holding four aces. While in the midst of my research, I was somewhat surprised to find on the back cover of the magazine I edit an ad for cigarettes. My indignation, expressed to my superiors, was duly noted. What goes around karmically comes around: Several weeks ago an excerpt from my novel, eagerly desired by the literary editor of a national magazine of reputation, was turned down by the magazine’s editor in chief on the grounds that it would imperil advertising. “Yes, yes,” I said, “I understand.”

—Adapted from a talk given to
The Century Association, 1994