Shall We Just Have a Toke On It?

Can you figure out which movie line is paraphrased by today's title? I am pretty sure that I have mentioned this movie, and the particular scene before, perhaps in one of the previous incarnations of this blog.  "Now, Voyager" is one of those classic old time black and white movies starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains in which the heroine is a woman traumatized by her possessive mother, seeks therapeutic help (this at a time when such help was viewed as suspicious and proof of a weak mind), changes from an ugly duckling into a swan, and then falls in love with an unhappily married man who has a daughter whose equally unhappy childhood rivaled her own. At the end of the movie, they do the honorable thing, toward his wife, toward each other, and toward the child they both love. As they gaze sacrificially into each other's eyes, Henreid seals the deal. He says, "Shall we just have a cigarette on it?" He places two between his lips, lights each and gives Bette one.



Watch it on You Tube. It's powerful. Well, maybe it's only powerful to a generation of Baby Boomers and before. But I can tell you, the idea of that scene, or any version of it, with the romantic leads and two joints, well, I just have to be the proverbial fuddy duddy. No way under the moon or stars!

What got me started with this today? Well, I was in the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles, walking  back to my car when I got the strongest whiff of someone or someones smoking marijuana, and I thought that if Proposition 64 passes, as I think it might, in California, which would legalize "recreational" use of marijuana--giving lip service to all the protections for children vis a vis advertisement and availability--I could be subjected to the noxious smell wherever I go. We will have exchanged what I have been told for year upon year is a filthy, unhealthy habit (and that's fine, I am not a smoker, though with all the second hand smoke I inhaled as a child from every relative who DID smoke, I should already be dead) for an even more unhealthy and filthier habit, one that warps the brain and leads to other drug use.

Marijuana has always smelled to me, and to others who object to it as much, like the noxious spray of the skunk. It actually makes me feel sick if in too much concentration, as in some concerts where my generation remember the good old days when they didn't trust anyone over 30. Now that they are more like 70, I wonder if the old axiom raises any ontological problems for them? But I digress.

We are telling our soldiers that they can't smoke cigars, an idiocy if ever I heard one. But we are going to open the floodgates to weed?

Now personally, I don't care if you smoke marijuana, or drink, or smoke cigarettes.  What I do care about is summed up in words spoken by Burl Ives as "Big Daddy" to Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof", "Didn't you notice a powerful odor of mendacity in this room?"

"Mendacity" folks, is lying. If you are going to insist that children and adults be forbidden (you say they are not forbidden, but in truth, there is all sort of restraint and societal disapproval heaped upon smoking) then what of marijuana? You cannot in all seriousness want to make marijuana the cigarette of the future? Oh, you can? Talk about the powerful odor of mendacity! And an odor that is far more objectionable than that of any cigarette. What of my rights not to have that stink and second hand high thrust upon me?

Well, there is nothing I can do. I live in California and the folk here are itching for legal toke parties.
I can't get the image out of my mind of Bette and Paul sealing the romantic deal with joints,  It is very disturbing. But I really don't want to hear about how bad cigarettes are and how they should be limited. Oh, and, we are doomed.