Let Barack smoke!

An open letter to Michelle Obama, after a killer week for her husband's campaign.

UPDATE: David Sedaris, on the semiotics of cigarette brands when he was younger:

It was in a little store a block from our hotel that I bought my first pack of cigarettes. The ones I’d smoked earlier had been Ronnie’s—Pall Malls, I think—and though they tasted no better or worse than I thought they would, I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren’t Vantage people fundamentally different from those who’d taken to Larks or Newports? What I didn’t realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultra-long. All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems for alcoholics, and Mores for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never lend money to a Marlboro-menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular-Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultra-lights not only threw a wrench in the works but made it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight. All that, however, came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.

The cigarettes I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I’d often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas-station attendants and, no doubt, thought that they’d make me appear masculine, or at least as masculine as one could look in a beret and a pair of gabardine pants that buttoned at the ankle. Throw in Ronnie’s white silk scarf and I needed all the Viceroy I could get, especially in the neighborhood where this residence hotel was.

My parents were, and are, devoted smokers of Marlboro Reds. I've always hated that: I'm not a smoker, and Marlboro Reds are the cigarettes I don't smoke. Because see, you just couldn't trust those Winston smokers. They seemed dodgy to me. And one of our neighbors smoked Salems, which struck me as kind of girly for a man to smoke. There was the lady in the subdivision who smoked Vantages, which had a hole in the filter -- can you imagine? What the hell was she hiding? My uncle smoked filterless Pall Malls, which struck me as savage, but not as savage as the filterless Camels that the air-conditioner repairman down the road. But then again, he really was a badass (he was Snafu Shelton, one of the most memorable characters in E.B. Sledge's classic memoir of U.S. Marine combat in the Pacific war, "With the Old Breed" ).