Literary Quote of the Day

How I Learned to (Almost) Love the Sin Lobbyists


    "A couple of years ago, while wondering with some desperation what to write about, I turned on the TV and there was a nice-looking talking-head lady from the Tobacco Institute, manfully (as it were) denying that there was any scientific link between smoking and cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, or athlete's foot.  She was attractive, well-spoken, intelligent and as persuasive as she could be, given the deplorably disingenuous data she was pitching.  I thought: What an interesting job that must be.  Get up in the morning, brush your teeth, and go and sell death for a living.
     A few days later I was reading in the paper about some teenage kid who, to judge from his blood alcohol content, had drunk two kegs of beer single-handedly, then got in his pickup truck and careened over the yellow line into a minivan, annihilating an entire Boy Scout troop.  And there at the bottom of the story was a quote from a spokesman for the beer-keg industry saying what an awful tragedy it was, but that no one was more concerned about teenage drunk driving than the beer-keg industry.  I thought: Boy, I bet that guy trembles every time his beeper goes off.
    A few days after that, a 'disgruntled postal worker' went bonkers and blew away his supervisor and a half dozen others with a gun with a name like Hamburger-Maker .44 Triple-Magnum.  And sure enough, the National Rifle Association was right on the case, worrying out loud that if we start outlawing Hamburger-Maker .44s, how long before we outlaw the Swiss Army knife?  I thought: There's another interesting job.
    The idea formed of writing a major, thick, serious, nonfiction study of institutional hypocrisy in America...But I kept coming back to these three yuppie Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Another title came to me: Thank You for Smoking.  And then the mortgage bill arrived, so that settled it.


~ Christopher Buckley, Wry Martinis