Explaining Human Frailty to a 6-Year-Old

The other day my 6-year-old asked me why her grandmother smoked. “Smoking makes you die,� she said.

“Yeah, it does,� I replied.

And then I went on to describe my mother to her granddaughter as someone who is addicted to what ails her. Except my daughter said that she didn’t know what addicted meant.

So I told her that Grandma can’t help herself, that she knows she is doing wrong but that she does it just the same. This is not something that I wanted to tell my daughter about someone we love.

Put aside the role model business for a minute. In essence, I told my daughter that Grandma was killing herself slowly, puff by puff. She will probably be leaving us sooner than she should, of her own free will.

I’ve told my mother the same, of course. Ad nauseam, she says. She’s smoked since she was a teen-ager and never let up.

“I enjoy smoking,� she tells me, ad nauseam herself.

My mother and I don’t talk about her smoking much any more. We never really talked about it anyway, not in the sense of give and take. When I bring up my lines, my mother snaps them down.

“Are you going to start?� she asks. That will usually shut me up, although I give her an icy look.

Then later I worry that I have written my mother off.

“Leave me alone,� she says.

By now, the larger discussion about cigarette smoking is very old as well. It was way back in 1964 that the U.S. surgeon general proclaimed smoking a hazard to the public health. Now the anti-smoking message is more straightforward, minus the hedging, not as nice:

When used according to manufacturers’ instructions, cigarettes kill.

Today, even the tobacco industry, busy sowing addicts overseas, seems to be blowing slightly less smoke about its product at home. The Tobacco Institute says it “recognizes the risks associated with smoking.� Yes, baby, this qualifies as coming a long way.

But the basic premise of the smokers’ argument has changed less. This being America, people have the right to smoke if they so chose.

(I mean, at least in their own homes. Or then again, maybe that depends on if they rent or own . . . .)

Tobacco companies, additionally, have the right to make lots of money as Americans exercise their free will to smoke. Even as the number of cigarettes sold in the nation continues to fall, profits in the tobacco industry are higher than ever these days. They tripled from 1980 to 1988 alone.

And our federal government continues to help out with its subsidies to tobacco farmers and the bales of money it invests in crop research and development. Who says smoking is politically incorrect?

I could go on with more statistics--Did you know, ladies, that lung cancer is the No. 1 cancer killer of women today? Did you know, everybody, that smoking is associated with more death and sickness than drugs, alcohol, traffic accidents and AIDS combined?--but that would be a bore.

Talking about the dangers, the numbers, has become just another harangue. We know. We’ve heard. We are adults. We have the right to choose. I suppose these are my mother’s lines echoing in my ears.

Except now I am a mother too, with two children who take the world far more literally than the grown-ups do. I’ve got a daughter who wonders why her grandmother smokes when she knows it means that she’ll be around her less.

It’s the children’s perceptions that we should all worry about now. American kids are an advertiser’s dream. Today, Joe Camel is laid-back cool and the new Kool penguin comes off sounding like Bart Simpson in formal wear.

And the Marlboro Man, from another generation, is dead. Only this is for real.

Wayne McLaren, who gained fame as a Marlboro Man in 1975, spent his final years on a private crusade to tell kids that they had better wise up.

Only cartoons are immortal. Real-life smokers get cancer and die.

McLaren, who smoked for 25 years, was 51 when he died of lung cancer in July in Newport Beach. “I’ve spent the last month of my life in an incubator and I’m telling you, it’s just not worth it,� he said. “I’m dying proof that smoking will kill you.�

Do we need any more? This saga is way too old.