Thank You for Smoking

Today, however, Nick was not enjoying his small role in the great serial drama of American history. Today was more of an exercise in waiting, a combination of jury selection and Disney World. It was now a few minutes to four, and Nick had been waiting to testify since ten a.m. Finisterre's petty revenge. At first he wasn't even going to allow Nick to appear before his subcommittee, but he relented when Senator Jordan privately threatened to cut off his highway improvement funds. (After the Captain privately threatened to cut off his free jet.)

So far, Nick had listened to tobacco — and himself in particular — be denounced by adversaries familiar and new: Mothers Against Smoking, Teenagers Against the Exploitation of Youth (what a bunch of dweebs), the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Finisterre, subtle fellow that he was, wanted to jackhammer home the point that tobacco was just another drug, like crack), and the Coalition for Ethical and Responsible Advertising (a rather small group). At four, after a weepy Hispanic woman finished a lurid description of how her husband, Ramon, had been killed by the evil weed—"He no can read so he no know is so bad for him" — Finisterre tried to adjourn the proceedings for the day. At which point Senator Plum Rudebaker of North Carolina, tobacco's man on the subcommittee, growled into his mike that this "lynchin' " had gone on long enough and demanded that Nick be heard, today.

Nick graciously thanked Chairman Finisterre for the opportunity to present his views before such a distinguished committee. How proud the founders would have been of the senators before him: over two thousand bounced checks between them, a seducer of underage Senate pages, three DUIs, one income-tax evader, a wife beater whose only defense was that she'd beat him up first, and a case of plagiarism, from, of all sources, a campaign speech of Benito Mussolini. (The senator later blamed the episode on an "overzealous staffer.")

As soon as Nick launched into his prepared statement, which consisted of an eloquent plea not to turn the American tobacco farmer into the Dust Bowl Okies of the nineties — complete with tear-duct-pumping quotes from The Grapes of Wrath—two of the senators ostentatiously stood up and left, without even going through the usual pretense of telling the chairman that the safety of the Republic depended on their immediate presence elsewhere. Nick paused in his recitation long enough to reflect that it's a sorry state when seducers of teenagers and Mussolini-quoters feel morally superior to you. He would shore up his prepared statement by proudly pointing to the Academy's vigorous anti-underage-smoking campaign. That done, Rudebaker tossed out the softball, right on cue.

"Ah'd lak to thank Mistuh Nayla fuh his courage in attendin' today's hea'ngs," he intoned in his Tarheel baritone. "And ah'm not just speaking to his mor'l courage, but his physical courage." Nick modestly lowered his eyes, an appropriate gesture, considering that he'd ghostwritten these very words of the senator's. "For it's mah understandin'," Rudebaker continued, "that he has been threatened by a number of mah distinguished colleague from Vuhmont's con-stit-uents."

"Just what," Finisterre barked, "does the gentleman from the tobacco-producing state imply by that remark?"

"Ahh'm not implyin' anythin'." Again on cue, Plum held up a fistful of papers, spilling them all over. Photographers, by now near coma from boredom, fired away, filling the room with the cricket-sound of motorized drives. "An' neither do these death threats, all o' which are postmarked from the great state of Vuh-mont." Murmur murmur, gavel gavel.

"I certainly hope that my distinguished colleague…" Amazing, senatorial courtesy.". isn't suggesting that these alleged letters were somehow the result of some coordinated effort—"

"Ah'm not sayin' or suggestin' or otherwise hintin' at anythin' of the sort. Ah'm merely sayin' that it's a saad day when a man whose only crayhm is representin' the interests of a legal product becomes a hunted man. In that regahd, ah'd like to point out to the distinguished chairman that Mistuh Nayla has already suffuhd kidnappin' and tor-cher fuh doin' his job. An' now he's got to live with thiyuss. Myself, ah don't know who put these cheesemongerin' assassins on his case, but ah am proposin' that their elected representatives show a little leadership and call off these dogs of wah, before someone gets hut."

"Gets what?" said a reporter sitting behind Nick.

"Plum certainly rose to the occasion," BR said the next day as he and Nick scanned the media coverage, finisterre disavows threats against tobacco spokesman.