Smoking on the Subway

Inhaling the fumes of lowercase "r" revolution

On more than one occasion, I've seen people smoke cigarettes in a poorly ventilated and crowded subway car. There's the puffs of vapor and marijuana smoke too, with the void of conscientiousness coming in many flavors.

There's been decades of medical consciousness-raising over the issue of second hand smoke. Legal banning of smoking in public spaces came as a result. A social effort to comply with the new norms ensued.

In some cases, the law is broken not to merely benefit ourselves at the cost of the collective, but to directly stand in defiance of abstract power itself as a political gesture. Sure, the law is tied to the corrupt courts, and a bill is passed by the big bad government. You can tell yourself that smoking on the subway is done in the spirit of insubordination to these entities, but these aren't really the true target of your protest.

Anti-establishmentarianism has its time and place, with a reasonably cohesive set of arguments in its defense, albeit ones that are misguided and intellectually lazy. Nonetheless, it has fallen out of vogue. Enemy Number One is now The Social Contract itself or, other people.

Anti-social personalities gained some cover in the 21st century, as their provocations were reframed as symptoms of revolution. Opportunistically looting a Best Buy became anti-capitalist praxis at its finest. Things like property theft became a useful cudgel for the activists to spin tales about the chickens coming home to roost. Consequently, downtown businesses throw in the towel and workers are put out of work.

All this underscores a theme of self-debasement, a belief that our worst impulses need to be accommodated, and that our morals should correspond with the lower standards we've set for ourselves.

Restaurants let dogs in the front door now on the rationalization that humans have fallen to the canine level. Why shouldn't we eat with the dogs, when we view ourselves as being no better than animals? I look around at the creatures and anthropomorphize them like anyone else, but I've alway been Team Human, and we should defend the right to our own tables.

The climate fatalists celebrate the prospect of human extinction. They want to liberate nature from our species so its zero-sentient existence can prevail. When I hear this rhetoric, I'm reminded that being Team Human shouldn't be taken for granted. We have our detractors now.

Communism keeps getting these cultural victories that help to rehabilitate its image and entice  ahistorical support. McCarthyism helped frame anti-communism as the embodiment of unjust, paranoid persecution, while the failure of Vietnam led many to conclude our enemies must have stood for something more honorable than ourselves.

So there's an insidious current of Marx's Manifesto reprising itself in the hands of those who lost the plot. No, they haven't all read it, but the spirit of Marx drips from the universities, into social media channels, propagandized onto the impressionable ones, and propagated into the social attitudes of the public.

It's getting hard to salvage these minds, but I think the Reality Principle will rear its ugly head at some point. Trump didn't bring literal fascism to our republic, but the spirit of his political brand made us feel like we had lived through one. After Kamala, I think the voters will drive the Democrat Party to the other end of the extremist bell curve. We might not gallop to the gulags, but it will feel like we had done so.

And when the gig is up for the tepid moderates, I'll remember the omen of subway cigarette smoke.