Pipe the Good Pipe

"The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected..."

-William Makepeace Thackeray, from The Social Pipe

"A pipe is the fountain of contemplation, the source of pleasure, the companion of the wise; and the man who smokes, thinks like a philosopher and acts like a Samaritan."

-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Lest we forget…tobacco is one of the good effects emanating from the One Cause who is sheer goodness. This ought to be the principle hermeneutic lens by which we judge tobacco use. Furthermore, tobacco and more specifically the smoking of it in a pipe, was once a recognizable institutional symbol of the familial patriarch within the Christian cultural (note the laudable list of authentically Christian manly men who were pipe smokers). As we are now in the midst of a hostile effort to destroy the remnants of any Christian order, and to replace normative family life, which is headed by a strong paternal element with a noxious unisex/effeminate disorder, it is not surprising that certain emblems of the patriarch, such as pipe smoking, would be targeted for disfavor and suppression. We ought not to allow anti-Christian/anti-family sentiments, to strip us of our masculinity. We must stand firm against all anti-pipe/anti-male politically correct rhetoric, with pipes tightly clenched in our teeth.

One more thing, the anti-tobacco campaign is merely rhetoric: If people realized how much of the propaganda campaign about tobacco paid for by tax monies is simply false, and how much is simply the reflection of belief without evidence, they would be shocked. Check out the following info I came across:

The Surgeon General's 1964 report states that most pipe smokers (those who do not inhale into their lungs) live longer than non-smokers. The only way a different statistic has ever been generated has been by including ex-cigarette smokers who migrated to pipes in the statistics, or by including the small number of original pipe smokers who inhale in the statistics. The same is true of cigar smoking although about half of cigar smokers inhale. But those who do not, live longer than nonsmokers. Of course, smokers may be more prone to get cancer, but if they are outliving their nonsmoking brethren and getting it when the aforesaid brethren are decomposing in the humus, then this does not mean what the little energumens of State Hygiene have at great public expense told us that it means. These figures are not known, because they contradict the second hand smoke hypothesis, a hypothesis that itself cannot be sustained without playing statistical tricks (e.g., one study includes people who smoked cigarettes & inhaled into their lungs for up to twenty years and then stopped among "nonsmokers" for purposes of getting their effect of second hand smoke on "nonsmokers"). Even those who inhale cigarettes are not in all cases likelier to die earlier of cancer--both in Japan during a time when 80% of the men chain smoked cigarettes, and now in China when many Chinese men smoke, the links found in the US with smoking are not turning up. In Japan, during the sixties, the life expectancy of chain smoking Japanese men was longer than that of non-smoking American males. But it remains the case that whereas one can perform any obscenity or sacrilege in any hotel room in NY City, one cannot in any hotel room enjoy a mild English pipe tobacco and chat with a friend. Read Tolkiens "The Scourging of the Shire" in Lord of the Rings for what I think should happen to the moral idiots responsible for this state of affairs.

God fear’in; pipe smok’in patriarchs:
Hilaire Belloc; Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati; Tom Crean; G.K. Chesterton; J.R.R. Tolkien; Evelyn Waugh; etc...