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Over two weeks ago on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, correspondent Scott Simon interviewed 14 year-old Speck Mellencamp about a bet he made with his father.
"1,000,000 to join, my dad John Mellencamp will quit smoking" is a Facebook page started by Speck as the result of an agreement with his dad: if one million people join, the multiple Grammy Award winner and 2008 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee has to quit smoking.
(partial interview edit --- click here for audio)
SS (Scott Simon): What did your father say when you told him you were going to do this?
SM (Speck Mellencamp): He didn't really think that it could get to that high of a number.
SS: As far as you know, has he ever tried to quit smoking?
SM: He's tried, but he hasn't really been able to do it for more than a couple of weeks.
SS: Do you think he'd like to quit smoking?
SM: I would think he would like to, but I just don't think he ever had the willpower to.
SS: If it happens, what can having a million people telling him to... do, that you and your family telling him can't accomplish?
SM: The peer pressure of just having it and he says that if a million people do that, then if somebody sees him doing it, then he'll seem like the bad guy, so he kind of has to.
SS: Are people leaving comments on the Facebook page?
SM: Oh yeah. My favorite comments that I get are from other people saying that if it gets to a million, that they would quit too.
SS: Oh. So this could set off something?
SM: Yeah. I've gotten lots of them, and I've also had lots of people tell me about stories of loved ones and friends that have died from lung cancer and smoking-related stuff.
SS: ... does your father check in on this every day?
SM: Uh, yeah, he asked me how many people I'm up to... about every day.
SS: (laughs) What do you read in his face, his emotions? Is he beginning to think, "Oh no, this might work?"
SM: I think he's really surprised because he told me he thought it was just going to be a couple of my friends who join the (Facebook) group.
SS: So he's still smoking right now, though?
SM: Yeah, but he's cut back a lot, because it hit 100,000.
SS: And are you ever tempted to look at him and say, "Well, you enjoy it now, because..."
SM: Yeah, I actually have said that a couple of times.
SS: Mr. Mellencamp, nice talking to you. Good luck.
SM: Thank you.
::
Three days later on his website, John Mellencamp offered this response to his son's effort:
"Speck is doing this to try to persuade me to stop smoking, and I look at it as a huge act of love on his behalf. The conversation in our house took about four minutes when he said he was going to do it, and I said, ‘Sure, Speck. Go ahead!,’ and now he’s gone on NPR! But he was asked to go on ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘Larry King’ and we could have blown it up a lot bigger but we said no to everything else so as not to exploit him or make it seem like it was just a publicity stunt as some cynics have said. In no way was it meant to gain national attention like it did, and we’d like to thank people for supporting my son in his endeavors: He’s a big dreamer, and I hope that someday he’ll use his dream to benefit his world in some fashion."
::
Of course, there are at least two sides to every story. The other comes from Speck's mother, Elaine Irwin Mellencamp, courtesy of WTHR-13, Indianapolis:
"He (Speck) said, 'Now Dad, so if I made a Facebook group and I got 100,000 people to join it, would you quit smoking?' And I think John just kind of flippantly, 'Oh blah blah blah', wasn't even paying attention to it, and apparently I guess he didn't agree to the 100,000, so there was no negotiation. It went from 100,000 to a million," Irwin-Mellencamp said.
Let it not be said that this was a manipulative, one-sided bet by Speck. His dad played hardball, and in my own judgment, John unknowingly avoided being rushed unprepared into the spectacularly crappy state known as cigarette withdrawal. On the other hand, it took almost a month for 268,412 Facebook users to sign onto Speck's page. With over 100,000 of these members joining in the first four days of his project, the trend indicates that it will take at least four months for Speck's page to hit the goal of one million members, and thus bind John by his father/son bet to give up smoking.
If you are a Facebook user and a fan of John Mellencamp, or just willing to support a top-notch public-eye progressive, then I hope you join Speck's group. John Mellencamp co-founded the nonprofit organization Farm Aid in 1985 along with Willie Nelson and Neil Young. Their annual concerts have raised over 36 million dollars to help keep family farmers on their land. John Mellencamp is also an outstanding Democrat, who not only played rallies for John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton over the course of the 2008 primaries, but challenged the McCain campaign over their usage of the pro-populist songs "Pink Houses" and "Our Country" at his rallies. Though to be fair, Mellencamp wasn't the only one.
We need to encourage this guy to stick around awhile, as his friend Billy Joel demonstrated in his induction speech for Mellencamp's inclusion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year:
Don't let this club membership change you, John. Stay ornery, stay mean. We need you to be pissed off, and restless, because no matter what they tell us - we know, this country is going to hell in a handcart. This country's been hijacked. You know it, and I know it. People are worried. People are scared, and people are angry. People need to hear a voice like yours that's out there to echo the discontent that's out there in the heartland. They need to hear stories about it. They need to hear stories about frustration, alienation and desperation. They need to know that somewhere out there somebody feels the way that they do, in the small towns and in the big cities. They need to hear it.
And it doesn't matter if they hear it on a jukebox, in the local gin mill, or in a goddamn truck commercial, because they ain't gonna hear it on the radio anymore. They don't care how they hear it, as long as they hear it good and loud and clear -- the way you've always been saying it all along. You're right John, this is still our country.
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To call cigarette smoking a habit is akin to calling slavery a living arrangement.
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