TOBACCO OVERLORDS TRAP NEW TEEN SLAVES-- BUT EVERYTHING'S COOL.

High school students may have made some progress in areas like social tolerance and sexual identity, but as far as smoking goes it's like the 1950s out there. Smoking kills but, hey, it's cool. Seduced by sophisticated advertising and marketing campaigns that are ten times more nefarious than the Bush campaign, yet welcomed into the subconscious, kids are puffing up a storm-- and they're starting early. According to the New York Times, a new study shows that 12.8% of students starting in middle school in the fall were "established smokers." By the following summer, 15.2% of them were smokers. ("Established smoker" means that you've smoked on at least 20 of the previous 30 days and you've had more than 100 cigarettes in your life. Nine percent of kids between 11 and 19 are established smokers.)

Why'd they start? Well, to fit in--and because they couldn't think of any less harmful or more creative ways to do so. Obviously, the enlightened, analytical resistance that challenged racism, sexism and (to some degree) homophobia could still be applied to that blindness-producing, peer-pressure susceptibility we might call "coolism."

Not that we hate smoking. We don't. We just think that if you're gonna be into it, at whatever age, you should embrace and enjoy it for what it is-- a kind of slavery to corporate agendas-- which plenty of people we know do, in a perverse, sickly conscious way (which transforms their smoking an ongoing performance piece of the Ron Athey school).