I’d been reluctant to say this, but now I think it is time…that the ban on smoking is responsible for all this.
Been downhill ever since. The rats are out in the open. The good people are in hiding. As at Columbia U, where thousands there and elsewhere are staging an American Kristallnacht.
Yes, I know, smoking cigarettes can be hazardous to your health, second-hand smoke included, but back then, before 1995, people had choices. It was live and let live.
I smoke a pipe. Can’t write without a pipe, and please spare me the lectures. Sometimes I join the pipe community on YouTube. We are a special breed.
Hitler never drank or smoked, and look what happened. Part of his Nazification process was to ban smoking throughout the country.
More than 80 million of them snapped-to, and became obedient Nazis. Overnight they traded the crucifix for the swastika.
In his novel, “The Gambler,” Dostoyevsky speaks derisively about the German habit of full devotion and obedience to the “Fater,” whatever the consequences.
It seldom, if ever, ends well.
We, in America, had never been an obedient people. We like to think of ourselves as rugged individuals who, to our credit, kowtow to nobody.
So far, at least, we’ve not had a Hitler or Mussolini. Saying that, I realize that Democrats offer fealty to Party over Country.
What they are doing to Trump is Exhibit A.
The big picture arrived in 1995 when California became the first state to ban smoking in public spaces and…and from that an intolerant, antisemitic generation was born.
Other states soon followed, and then soon enough, and sure enough the ban included private spaces, like your own backyard.
Woke became the language and the culture, and it all began in 1995. Liberals now had a cause sanctioned by the government. They took to it as a holy war. Liberals became an army of do-gooders who could, and did, taunt you and report you for smoking, and for being Jewish…exactly what is happening today at Columbia U and campuses everywhere.
Be sure of this. These Jew-hating monsters are all born-again Nazis who do not smoke. Shouting death to Israel, death to America…that they will do.
But smoking? Absolutely not.
Hitler would be proud.
Even Jonathan Greenblatt has noticed? He’s the CEO at the ADL…the anti-defamation league, which was founded to protect Jews from antisemitism.
Over the years, however, he has tilted the organization entirely left while favoring black causes, like BLM, over Jewish causes, and now he is outraged…really OUTRAGED…at what he sees with his own eyes at Columbia U. This should not be happening, he says, in his own neighborhood, and maybe, Jonathan, it would not be happening had you been doing your job.
Millions in endowments…for whom…for what?
At the same time, I’ve been getting emails from Jews who admit to being Democrats, but are terrified at what has been transpiring at Columbia U…. only a block from where they live.
Different, isn’t it, when the chickens come home to roost. Chances are, though, that they will vote Democrat again and again.
What was wrong with the old days?
Back then, those cigar-chomping smoke-filled rooms produced for us a Lincoln. Today’s “clean-living” politicians gave us Obama and Biden.
The mischief has been done.
Biden? He is doing the moral equivalency tap dance, caving to AOC, Omar and Rashida Tlaib. The return of Trump is our only hope.
In today’s movies, nobody smokes. No more Humphrey Bogart lighting one up for Lauren Bacall. In those days, smoking was masculine, romantic.
Were we wrong to admire this? All I know is that people are flawed, in the movies and out. Imperfection is the way of the world.
We should accept people for what they are, not as they should be. Says Big Black Andre in this gambling novel…”I do believe that some crookedness does go on, but that the least crooked place is the racetrack. Everything else is a scam. The stock market is a scam, politics is a scam, TV news is a scam; it’s all fixed and crooked. Can’t trust No Body. The fix is in wherever you turn. Anybody want to argue the point?”
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.