Sunday, July 08, 2007
WSJ Endorses Cigarettes!
I thought that smoking was entirely banned from American media (as well as most interior spaces). No more smoking in cinema (the films even, I mean, not just the theaters), and none on TV for a while. Yet herewith the first sentence of a Wall Street Journal article on John Smeaton, a Glasgow airport baggage handler who attacked a suspected terrorist who was resisting arrest:
The article doesn't say what the outcome was (we're presumed to know) nor suggest that the cigarette gave him strength and energy like spinach gave Popeye-the-Sailor. But if John didn't smoke (or smoking were still allowed in the terminal), he wouldn't be such news, would he? Maybe someone else would be, but who knows?. Okay, the Wall Street Journal doesn't actually credit the cigarette with an assist, but it doesn't hide the fact that a smoker was smoking when he had the provocation to intervene and instinctively seized it (not because he was a smoker, but because he is who he is; nor to become a hero, but he did).
I wonder how the editorial/commentary pages would have spun it.
GLASGOW -- Last Saturday afternoon, baggage handler John Smeaton was standing in front of Glasgow Airport smoking a cigarette when a Jeep Cherokee burst into flames nearby.
The article doesn't say what the outcome was (we're presumed to know) nor suggest that the cigarette gave him strength and energy like spinach gave Popeye-the-Sailor. But if John didn't smoke (or smoking were still allowed in the terminal), he wouldn't be such news, would he? Maybe someone else would be, but who knows?. Okay, the Wall Street Journal doesn't actually credit the cigarette with an assist, but it doesn't hide the fact that a smoker was smoking when he had the provocation to intervene and instinctively seized it (not because he was a smoker, but because he is who he is; nor to become a hero, but he did).
I wonder how the editorial/commentary pages would have spun it.
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# posted by Maurice Lanselle @ 8:42 PM 
