It’s not that I am anti-fad. I wear a banded-collar shirt while driving my sport utility vehicle to the organic market to purchase spring water in which to boil free-range brown rice that my new age healer will smear onto the aura of my daughter’s beanie baby. Hell, I even browse the World Wide Web.
The cigar craze, however, leaves me not merely cold but mystified.
Cigars have, of course, been with us for eons. Some biblical scholars have argued that the pillar of fire that spoke to Moses atop Sinai was merely the lit end of the divine stogie.
Many know that cigars were smoked by American Indians long before Europeans brought them into the modern world by adding those nifty paper rings.
In Western culture, prior to the most recent times, the cigar served a single end — to make girls throw up.
But now cigar smoking is hip, it’s in. From President Clinton to Mayor Daley to Bill Cosby, people are puffing away like so many steam locomotives. Cigar magazines are as ubiquitous as carcinogens or city council indictments.
Madonna and Demi Moore notwithstanding, cigars strike me as an egregiously testosterone-enriched phenomenon.
Still, many are left wondering: Why? Whence derives cigar chic?
One common explanation is that in a PC world, cigars are rebel heat. They are a thumb in the eye of the health freaks, lung lovers and cancer phobics.
Not just smoking, but the vilest, most noxious style of smoking this side of Beelzebub.
Cigars are an amusement to bring Smokey Bear to his furry knees. They produce a stench so foul that fire-breathing dragons run from their presence in raw-throated, hacking despair.
Cigars stink and they are unhealthy. So why are they so popular?
The most likely explanation is that cigars are a communist plot. Cigars are some of the very things the U.S. wants from Cuba, and we want them baaad.
Staunch anti-communists like Alexander Haig rationalize their affection for the fruit of communism by asserting, “I prefer to think of it not as smoking Castro’s cigars but as burning his crops.”
Capitalist posterchild Ted Turner defended accepting a case of cigars from Castro by saying, “Oh, Fidel, he ain’t no communist, he’s just like me, a dictator.”
Clearly, stogiemania is part of a well-orchestrated, and so far successful, plot to build support for Communist Cuba.
If Cuban baseball players start appearing on the covers of cigar magazines, you’ll know I’m right.
