Fuming in Italy

Two Saturdays ago, just before going off to join the antiwar manifestazione in Florence that drew half a million people, I ate a big lunch about a mile from the march route. Rule Number One for anyone covering a protest is to eat beforehand. Neighborhood purveyors of foodstuffs have a way of scheduling impromptu siestas whenever hundreds of thousands of placard-waving, bongo-banging, very stoned 20-year-olds are about to come tramping down the street. The restaurant I picked was a small place off of Via San Gallo, a bit touristy, but serviceable for an appetizer of pecorino, apples and honey; a primo piatto of soppressata with parsley and olive oil and a secondo of tripe. Afterward, coasting along on my first sip of espresso, I lit a Camel and started reading the papers. I felt pretty good about being in Europe.

At that moment, a grad-school-aged guy eating alone leans across from two tables away and says, "Scusa, Signore."

Signore was me. When I looked up, Grad Student gave me a creepy little unctuous smile and asked me in American-accented (but really pretty superb) Italian if I would mind "extinguishing" (estinguere) my cigarette, since it bothered him. (And here he gave another unctuous smile.) I didn't know what to say. It was a smoking restaurant?there were ashtrays on all the tables. The owner was smoking behind the bar about 30 feet away. So I replied to him in Italian?God knows why, since my vocabulary consists of about 100 words, 97 of which are the names of cold cuts and pizza toppings?"Va bene così?" And I moved my ashtray from the left-hand side of my plate to the right-hand side. He said sì. What else was he going to say?

It was a Pyrrhic victory. Grad Student had wrecked the peace of mind that is the heart and soul of a post-lunch smoke, and I was ashamed of myself for not having replied (in Italian) "Va fan culo" or (in American) "Fuck you." His effrontery was really something astonishing. This guy, taking me for an Italian, had assumed either that (a) being Italian, I was too stupid to realize that my cigarette-smoking was bad for me, or that (b) the superiority of his own preferences to those of the locals was so transcendently obvious that everyone in the place would gladly overturn the way they've been doing business ever since this restaurant opened, decades ago, out of sheer homage to Brad the Grad's opinions. Or out of homage to his needs for special pampering, to the extent that those are distinguishable from his "opinions."

To get a measure of the depth of this guy's rudeness, imagine an Italian tourist in the smoke-free hell that is Michael Bloomberg's New York lighting up a cigarette in some organic-food restaurant. When the patrons look at him a bit funny he says, "Ah, but I am Italian! It is better for me that I smoke in your restaurant! And better for you, too."

At such moments, the anti-anti-Americanism that is my guiding ethos these days is sorely tested. America's not a perfect country, it goes without saying, but in a time of terrorism American arrogance seems considerably less of a threat than the widespread Europusillanimity that would hand the continent over to the grenade-throwing confirmed bachelors of Al Qaeda. The collateral social damage when American freedoms and habits get spread around the world seems minimal, for the most part. There'll be a few more supermarkets, maybe, and a couple fewer salumerie, but European society will remain pretty much what it was. Nor do presidents like George Bush, who is merely defending his country from aggression in a time-honored way, constitute much of a threat to the European way of life. It's moralists like this clean-air creep?or his bossy-pants governmental equivalents, the Madeleine Albrights of the world?who most force me to reassess my first principles, and to grant that maybe Europeans are right when they say the United States is a force for imperialism.

But maybe this is a horse-has-left-the-barn argument. Last week, Italy's president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, said he would back an antismoking bill that has passed the Senate and would not be out of place in the New York of Mayor Gulag. It called for a ban in all public places, re-education for smokers, millions of dollars' worth of billboard propaganda...the whole shebang. And the Senate has tacked on a couple of innovations that draw upon what might charitably be called Italy's "1930s heritage": block committees of snoops to enforce the laws, and "super-fines" for people caught smoking in the presence of children and pregnant women. Whether or not such a measure passes, there are already troubling signs in this free-est of European countries of a Jacobin attitude toward rooting out tobacco. Sale non fumatori are proliferating in restaurants. There are nonsmoking cafes now. And Malpensa Airport in Milan, alone among the European airports I've traveled through, has turned into one of those antismoking fortresses, like Boston's Logan, where there is no smoking anywhere, and it's impossible to get through security to steal a smoke on the sidewalk.

As I've argued here ad nauseam, this kind of development ought to worry nonsmokers, too. Anyone who thinks the airline industry is not the most dangerous kind of oligopoly ought to consider the power dynamic that exists between airlines and airports on the one hand, and their customers on the other. Imagine a smoker who is stopping in Milan en route from, say, Moscow to Chicago. Having paid $11,000 for a first-class ticket, he is midway through 20 hours of smoke deprivation. In what kind of market other than an oligopoly does the consumer pay thousands of dollars for what is?I think we can agree?a pretty shoddy product, and the producer get to say, in effect, "Why don't you just go die?"

Blowing smoke

When we look at the prospects for antismoking legislation in Italy, though, we should consider that Ciampi is a pretty marginal figure. Italy is one of those European countries in which the prime minister is the head of state, but where there is also a ceremonial "president." The system is not to be confused with that of France, which has both a president and a prime minister, but where the president is the real leader, with the prime minister acting as kind of a plenipotentiary of domestic tinkering. No, the Italian system is more like Germany's. The prime minister gets elected in a parliamentary vote of massive national importance, and the president tends to be some antiquated hack chosen by the political establishment.

In Ciampi's case, he's the only member of Italy's mooshy left who remained standing after a series of corruption trials in the 1990s sent virtually the country's entire political class either to jail or into exile in Tunisia. If you hear the name Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and wonder whether he's the guy who won the Indy 500 in 1981 or the guy who owns the winery in the Napa Valley, you are not alone. Whenever I hear the name of the President of Germany?which I don't often?I'm always similarly confused. "Johannes Rau..." I think. "Now, is that the president of Germany? Or was he the guy who won the bronze in giant slalom at Sapporo in 1972?" It was the same way with Rau's predecessor Roman Herzog. "Roman Herzog... Is he the president of Germany? Or is he the winner of the National Book Award in 1972 for his Tales of Small Time Life in South Dakota?"

There are two key criteria for such a president: that he be politically irrelevant, and that he be at odds with the expressed political wishes of his citizenry. Put it this way: If America had the German-Italian system, with George W. Bush as a "prime minister" controlling both houses of Congress, our "president" would be someone like Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale. The president during the Clinton administration would have been, say, Howard Baker.

So, on the one hand, there is some hope that Ciampi is just blowing smoke on smoking laws. On the other hand, the writing seems to be on the wall, and the day may come when you go into your favorite European cafe and find it has descended into valetudinarian barbarism.