An Essay on Richard Klein's Introduction to Cigarettes Are Sublime

Not so Subliminal Messages

It is fact. There is no reason to contest this fact because Richard Klein has already let the reader-who is no doubt a part of a widely misguided generation-know that cigarettes are indeed sublime and he is going to show us how and tell us why. Throughout the preface and introduction, Klein continuously takes the cigarette from its "objective" position within many cultures as a "death stick" and analyzes this through the eyes of a now defamiliarized (though not very distant) past, reshaping them for a contemporary public. This exaltation of what is now a societal ill, a blotch on one's character, no doubt helped Richard Klein quit the habit-that Klein claims had to become a habit in order to be loved so dearly.

In the preface of Cigarettes Are Sublime, Klein attempts to prepare the reader for the worst by saying that his book "may sin on the side of irresponsibility, slip on the slope of fatuity, or slide into fiction or provocation in order to avoid being boring (xii)." Is this where the "literary criticism, analysis of popular culture, political harangue,

"When the religious dignity of smoking is completely obscured, we have lost a right to pray in public (16)." This statement has multiple layers, and the fact that it is a statement to begin with is very telling onto itself. The reader believes that despite the sentence structure appearing to deposit concrete knowledge into the willing mind of the reader, it functions more as a means for the reader to become more skeptical of her everyday liberties: "What other simple pleasures are denied me by my government?" Klein's statement also establishes smoking as a right which the government, ironically backing tobacco companies, attempts to relinquish from the public, once it has the majority's "consent."