Camus Can Do But Sartre Was Smartre
Hell is other people removing your cigarette
France’s National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre’s trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law.
Sartre himself would have been appalled by this. The guy smoked two packs a day. Being French I imagine him smoking Gauloises, essentially pocket sized factory-chimneys. Still he lived to a respectable 75 years of age.
Apparently the digitally removing of cigarettes from historic photo’s is becoming something of a trend. You cannot say that the Holocaust didn’t happen, but it’s OK to deny that historically people have enjoyed tobacco. I cry foul, revisionist bastards.
“Smoking,” the Left-wing existentialist wrote, is “the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world.”
Tell’em, Jean-Paul! I hope they’ll have to pry my last cigarette from my cold, dead, cancerous lips.
