SMOKING AND SNIFFING

 

                                            If eating to get high

                                            Pertains to the bureaucratic Kingdom,

                                            And drinking to get high

                                            Pertains to the democratic Church,

                                            Then smoking to get high

                                            Pertains to the autocratic State

                                            And sniffing to get high

                                            Pertains to the theocratic Centre.

                                            Eating and drinking

                                            Are natural and antinatural,

                                            Whereas smoking and sniffing

                                            Are subnatural and supernatural.

                                            If eating is barbarous and drinking civilized,

                                            Then smoking is uncivilized

                                            And sniffing supercivilized.

                                            Human evolution proceeds, we needn't doubt,

                                            From the first to the last,

                                            With all due compromises coming in-between,

                                            And should eventually culminate

                                            In a kind of sniffing absolutism,

                                            With eating, drinking, and smoking

                                            Beneath the pale of its future theocratic integrity.

                                            People of the Centrist civilization

                                            Won't eat and/or drink as freely

                                            As people do in a bureaucratic/democratic society,

                                            But will become increasingly partial

                                            To the use of vitamin tablets and/or capsules ...

                                            As appropriate to an age of sniffing,

                                            An alternative rather than supplement

                                            To natural foods and drinks.

                                            Smoking tobacco will be no less irrelevant

                                            Than drinking alcohol,

                                            And if any smoking were to be permitted

                                            During the lower phase of a Centrist age ...

                                            It could only be in the guise

                                            Of dope-smoking through pipes,

                                            As symptomatic of a pseudo-theocratic bias.