New York
Fifty-three years ago, Frank Loesser wrote a famous musical about the refusal of New Yorkers to kowtow to the demands of earnest reformers and implacable do-gooders. Since Guys and Dolls bowed, New York has survived J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Spiro Agnew, Rudy Giuliani and the ministrations of a host of other civic-minded zealots determined to force the city to clean up its act. But it could not survive Mike Bloomberg.
On 30 March of this year, Mayor Bloomberg finally got his wish when a citywide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants came into effect. Smokers were branded as the enemy of the people; sinister curs whose vile habits have contributed to the deaths of innumerable bartenders, waitresses, busboys, porters and, presumably, a substantial number of carnies, floozies, counter jumpers, barflies, rum runners and travelling salesmen. The ban also stripped New Yorkers of the right to light up in bowling alleys and rooftop gardens. The immediate effect was to force legions of angry, drunken smokers out into the streets where they could congregate in large angry circles and keep everybody in the neighbourhood awake until three o’clock in the morning complaining about not being able to smoke inside any more. New York City used to have a lot of bars. Now it is a bar.
Ten days after the ban came into effect, a bouncer at a trendy Lower East Side club was stabbed to death by a martial-arts student who became enraged when informed that he could not smoke inside the establishment. (Secondhand smoke, health advocates argue, leads to death, as do sharp, pointed objects.) The name of the club was Guernica, site of the Luftwaffe massacre during the Spanish Civil War that inspired Pablo Picasso, a one-time communist and smoker, to create his celebrated painting of the same name.
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