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While trying to convince a Malaysian friend to quit smoking those pleasant but deadly Indonesian Djarum cigarettes, I found myself drifting back to Richard Klein’s playful Cigarettes are Sublime (Duke: 1993) where he tries to explain what attracted him to the “dark beauty, negative pleaseures and exacting benefits” of cigarette-smoking, and why it was time to wean himself away from the subliminal but deadly pleasures of tobacco consumption. It’s a feel-good book of sort for the embattled smoker for Klein informs him/her that he/she is with distinguished company – Sarte, Mary McCarthy, Vaclav Havel, Humphrey Bogart, to mention a few. But what makes Klein’s work equally appealing to the ex-smoker is that he has found a way for us to justify our quitting the habit without necessarily invoking the pathological (cancer, ravaged lungs, etc.). You do not quit because you fear death, according to Klein. You quit because cigarettes have ceased to be sublime; you quit because it is now time to shift to other more interesting pleasures.

It was in the midst of relishing Klein’s arguments that I got to thinking about what smoking had done to my trifling petit-bourgeois life. For I used to smoke a lot before. I started late with this vice (18 years old and a UP sophomore), but made up for this tardiness by trying to finish a pack of cigarettes a day. The poison not only felt good, it also allowed me to consider myself in tune with the times.
One of the many trademarks of the student activists of my era was the appreciation of smoking. The aktibista then did not go around announcing his/her pedigree by the wearing of the tubao. In my time, it was how one strutted around, reading Felix Greene or Renato Constantino, while adeptly sucking the life (pardon the pun) of a cigarette stick hanging from the side of one’s mouth (The tubao was really a late addition to activist apparel, a 1980s product brought in from Mindanao by eager advocates of the CPP Mindanao Commission’s Marty Villalobos and his welgang bayan, politico-military framework).

Those overnight pulong debating which excerpts of Mao Tse Tung’s thoughts said it right (all these depended on which edition was available – the one released when Lin Biao was in power, or the one after he decided Mao was a liability and his plane mysteriously crashed), or planning for the next “lightning rally” would not be complete without the required smokes. Marlboros, if we had the money, but Champions if our overworked parents had not sent the monthly allowance to us yet.

What was smoked also depended on the attitude of your political officer: those who spent an inordinate time with the masa tended to adopt some of their habits. The political bosses who just came out of the rural areas demanded such peculiar brands as “Rambo” from us, their starry-eyed petty bourgeois devotees, while the urban cadres enjoyed consuming our Marlboros which they claimed they could never enjoy because of their paltry subsidy from the Finance Commission.

But one P.O. demanded that we try either those really cheap filter-less cigarettes for these were “what the masa want.” If we wanted then to, as my Maryknoller comrade put it, “make salamuha the masa,” then we had to smoke like them dirty our lungs and teeth all in the name of becoming one with the great unwashed. In one of this particular meeting that dragged into the wee hours of the morning, he even suggested that we roll parts of yesterday’s paper into cigarette wrappers, scrap the ashes out of the tray, and smoke them all -- ash, printer ink, recycled paper. A triple poison whammy, as it were.
It helped, of course, that our revolutionary idols –Chairman Mao, Uncle Ho, the Great Leader Jose Ma. Sison, the revisionist-renegade but good Marxist theoretician, Francisco Nemenzo, and many others, smoked. For we could now emulate them –imitating detail after detail, down to even how one venerated P.O. held his cigarette with his thumb and index finger. Very much like how Karla smoked as George Smiley tried in vain to convince him to defect. As it turned out, that P.O. actually was no original himself. He copied his style from a picture of the Jean Paul Sartre as he smoked his Gitanes while defending Mao’s butcher of 30 million of his countrymen and women.

And what of those bourgeois philistines who accused us of unduly wasting our lives by smoking? We found just the right reparte for that: our dear burgis, Mao and Ho were chain smokers and they made China and Vietnam great!! Ahh, to be young, Maoist and smoking.

But as Marxists – especially the vulgar variety – are wont to remind us, changes in the material world determine the extent to which one can aspire and dream. The poison that cigarette smoking distributes all over your body does eventually weaken your physique, and no amount of commitment to the revolutionary purpose can sustain the bodily vigor of the younger days. The philistines were right after all. Cigarettes did hamper our quest for a Pinoy version of Mao’s democratic people’s republic. As we aged, the diametrical opposition between smoking and confronting the advancing anti-riot policemen became more apparent. The more we smoked as we went through our 30s, the more difficult it was to run, the harder it was to heave the stone or to carry a hurt comrade away from the scenes of battles.

Around this time, however, my smoking took a slight detour. Alienation from the kilusan blended with the discovery that the idols were not all that flawless. Comrade Mao, the stories went on then, did not smoke peasant cigars that made his “making salamuha the masa” long admired. He favored British cigarettes, a taste he developed when he, a country bumpkin who was always laughed at by his more sophisticated comrades for his badly mangled Mandarin, was introduced to this better brand.

The Great Helmsman had shown a new way. But so did our local gurus. Francisco Nemenzo, then old Partido ideologue, now president of the University of the Philippines, whetted our appetites for Dunhills.

A slight gain in our incomes after graduation thus afforded us a chance to set aside some pesos for the regular trip to Quiapo to purchase from the Tausog dealer there these cigarettes, oftentimes at discounted price (“pareho man tang taga-Mindanao,” so went the quip. A budding inter-ethnic alliance was born, mediated, as any other relationship, by the cash nexus). To be in 30s once again, a renegade and enjoying Bensons and Hedges Gold.

Then in the early 1980s, a historical torsion occurred. The much-awaited final konfrontasi between estado and rebolusyon never transpired; instead in 1986, a badly organized bourgeois opposition supported by neo-fascists unhappy with Marcos’ bungling of the authoritarian project, social democrats who accidentally found themselves at the head of a popular movement, and motley groups of non-Partido leftists playing conscience and kibitzer to the now cacique-led opposition took over the scene.

The fantasy that gave meaning to the dream of a national democratic revolution, even outside of the CPP framework had disappeared; our fancy of fighting the “people’s war” and smoking one’s way to a dacha for being sympathizing members of the “middle forces” had, pardon the pun again, gone up in smoke. It did not help that the Filipino Ayatollah, now munching cheese, dancing at Utrecht’s discos and calling himself a “Professor,” split with the likes of the seminarian Marty Villalobos and the organizational men, Bilog, Rolly and Ric, using a technique we once only associated with Gringo and the militarists the coup (albeit internal). The Kaliwa had reached its nadir.
There was no basis anymore to keep the intimate association between smoke and revolution. Smoking had become meaningless. No, in fact, it even assumed a new more grotesque significance: in the era of Santa Corazon, it was increasingly associated with political alienation. So, as my former neighbors, the Katsila Rodriguezes of Ozamiz City would say, “hijo, para que pa?”

A few years later, I quit. I quit because there was no compelling reason anymore to smoke. I quit because smoking had become associated with political marginalization. I quit because in upstate New York, you are only allowed to smoke outside buildings. American moralism and self-righteousness combined with a fanaticism for the healthy body can be potent. (This is something odd: the U.S. is the numero uno polluter in the world, yet Americans maintain the illusion that they can be healthy). I quit because I was getting old. The consequences can be devastating; body-wise you gain an average of 20 pounds and your ankles begin to give way. But other things compensate for this physical debility. Slowing down afforded one more opportunities to sift through things more carefully. Archive research, reading books, writing, all grow in importance.

Being in one’s 40s and having stopped smoking, one gets more chances to smell the roses and enjoy Resil Mojares’ books on history and literature. All these more than compensate for the past life of smoking and aspiring for the Red East.

Happy Holidays to All.

(A good portion of this text was first printed in the November 3, 2002 issue of the webmagazine, www.Mindanews.com).