What does it feel like to wake up in the morning, get out of bed, have a little breakfast, and then head off to work knowing that this day, like all the days before, what you do will unobtrusively and effectively send more and more African Americans to a slow but certain death?
In her book on Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the off-repeated phrase, "the banality of evil," in her attempt to describe how apparently normal, seemingly non-insane people could so easily participate in the monstrousness of the Final Solution.
Banality is where you find it.
Just the other day, in a burst of pseudo-military bravado, Hillary Clinton reared back and vomited up this little gem. Asked what the U.S. should do if Iran were at attack Israel with nuclear weapons, she replied that the U.S. would "be able to totally obliterate" Iran in reply.
There are 65 million men, women, and children in Iran, all of whom Clinton would apparently be willing to murder. Clinton took a brief round of criticism for this blood-drenched remark, but no one called for her to be taken immediately to a mental hospital for a thorough work-up.
But committing genocidal murder can be so much more subtle than nuking whole countries. Take the seemingly benign little chemical flavoring, menthol.
That august temple of banality, the United States Congress, is currently considering a bill to give the Food and Drug Administration the legal authority to regulate tobacco. (Never mind the absurdity that the FDA has never had such authority in the first place.)
The bill bans the sale of candy-flavored cigarettes, less than 1 percent of the market. (Let us leave aside for now the question of what level of hell is reserved for those men and women who decided that using such flavored cigarettes to suck in young, first-time smokers, was an ethical act.)
But the bill does not ban the sale of menthol cigarettes. And what, you may ask, is so special about menthol as a cigarette additive, that it has to be protected above all other flavorings for cigarettes?
Would you believe...money? Here’s what the NY Times reports:
"The reason menthol is seen as politically off limits, despite those concerns, is that mentholated brands are so crucial to the American cigarette industry. They make up more than one-fourth of the $70 billion American cigarette market and are becoming increasingly important to the industry leader, Philip Morris USA, without whose lobbying support the legislation might have no chance of passage."
Menthol is not just any flavoring. It’s the flavoring of choice for cigarettes consumed by African Americans: more than 70% of black smokers use menthol brands, compared with only about 30% of white smokers. The tobacco industry has spent untold millions promoting menthol cigarettes in black communities and media. And there’s evidence that it is harder for menthol smokers to quit, and that menthol smokes who try to quit have a very high relapse rate.
According to a scientific paper by Phillip S. Gardiner published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research in 2004:
This unique social phenomenon was principally occasioned by the tobacco industry’s masterful manipulation of the burgeoning Black, urban, segregated, consumer market in the 1960s. Through the use of television and other advertising media, coupled with culturally tailored images and messages, the tobacco industry ‘‘African Americanized’’ menthol cigarettes. The tobacco industry successfully positioned mentholated products, especially Kool, as young, hip, new, and healthy. During the time that menthols were gaining a large market share in the African American community, the tobacco industry donated funds to African American organizations hoping to blunt the attack on their products.
Here's just one sample of what Gardiner found about how the tobacco industry's advertising juggernaut to insinuate menthol cigarettes into the African American media:
Between 1963 and 1965, cigarette advertising more than tripled in the pages of Ebony,one of the main African American magazines (Pollay et al., 1992). By 1962, Ebony carried twice as many cigarette ads (57) as did Life (28) (Pollay et al., 1992).
Read Gardiner’s article for more details than I have room for here about the techniques employed by the tobacco industry to wage what might be called a genocidal war against African-Americans, genocidal in the sense that the purveyors has reason to suspect that the normal use of their product would kill disproportionate numbers of African-Americans.
According to a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, there is no doubt about the link between menthol and increased mortality in African-Americans:
"I think we can say definitively that menthol induces smoking in the African-American community and subsequently serves as a direct link to African-American death and disease," said the former official, Robert G. Robinson, who retired two years ago as an associate director in the office of smoking and health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
All of the above are bad enough. But what I find truly horrifying is that many anti-smoking groups and Congressional supporters are so desperate to get a bill, any bill, that many of them have accepted the menthol exemption in the legislation, in the hopes that the FDA, an already over-worked and all-too-often toothless watchdog, will then figure out some way to regulate menthol cigarettes later on. (The chances of this bill becoming law are uncertain, with strong opposition from tobacco-state legislators, and the possibility that President Bush may veto it if it ever passes.)
So we’ve got an industry and a Congress who, in the face of evidence that producing menthol cigarettes leads to a disproportionate increase in the deaths of African Americans, are likely to win the fight to keep this murderous racially-selective product on the market. Every day, the CEOs of these companies, their employees, their lobbyists, and their bought-and-paid-for members of Congress get up in the morning, look in their mirrors, and go off to work another day, happy to be about making the world safe for their racially selective, poison gas-delivering product.