THE MIND POLICE ON THE MARCH

I don't smoke.

I never have.

I never will.

I hate being around it.

I think it's dirty, disgusting, and vulgar and I wish people wouldn't do it.

But what's more dirty, disgusting, and vulgar has been the Goebbels-esque campaign of disinformation and outright lies to attack not the practice, but the industry -- and ironcially using every "dirty trick" they accuse Big Tobacco of using to get kids to smoke: cartoons, games, comics, the whole gamut.

I don't know if this is backed by the "Truth" organization, but this takes it to a whole new level.

Do you remember that scene in "1984" where Winston has a photo of Party bigwigs at a function in New York, but one of them has fallen out of favor? The photo had already been doctored -- there had been yet another who had fallen out of favor earlier, but was previously excised from the photo; this time, however, Winston's job was simple. He slid it down the "memory hole," which was a chute to the incinerators. That's how Big Brother dealt with inconvenient facts about history.

Well, so, too, do the rabid anti-smoking hordes. Harper Collins, on new editions of a popular children's book, has doctored the photo of the book's illustrator to remove the cigarette he has in his hand.

We wouldn't want to give the children the wrong idea, ideas like history happened once and it's paramount to have an accurate assessment of it, rather than to retool it into something we like better these days. No, better to shield them from all that thinking for themselves.