From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [80]
The cherry-pie manufacturer, he gets it full force. Because one man in Washington has arbitrarily set a figure of cherries per cherry pie, the pie company comes up with an instrument that measures exactly the number of cherries per pie. It’s almost like a sieve used in panning for gold. They dip this thing into a vat of guck, they sift it, and when the other guck falls through they’ve got to be able to count thirty-two cherries. Before they turn the sifter into the pie, they’ve got to have a minimum of thirty-two cherries in it. The Government feels that the average guy who digs into his cherry pie doesn’t have any protection if he doesn’t have enough cherries in the pie. The only person who gets outraged at this is the pie maker and he’s doing it because he doesn’t want to have to say that he has ‘cherrylike’ pie instead of ‘cherry’ pie. So he’s going to comply with the ruling. Down the block another guy is thinking, ‘Good. Get that cherry-pie bastard.’ Nobody’s together on this thing.
The Government goes on the theory that my wife or your wife or everybody’s wife is too dumb to know the difference between the supercan and the monster can. That’s their theory: We better take care of the people because the people are too stupid to watch out for themselves. What happens is that we get people like Bess Myerson or Betty Furness to watch out for us. It’s amazing the people they recruit to be watchdogs for the people. I’m waiting for Frances Langford, or maybe Dorothy Lamour. Gloria De Haven would be good, too. Or Ann Miller. I can see Ann Miller doing twenty minutes on truth in packaging. I can’t understand how the thing is so screwed up. Why do they go to the entertainment world? How about Mickey Rooney? Or Shirley Temple? No, she’s out, because she’s representing us at the UN.
What gets me really mad is that the Government gets so hypocritical about the whole business. The Government says cigarettes are a hazard to your health. O. K. Why don’t they make the sale of cigarettes illegal? It would be very simple, no trouble – just classify cigarettes along with grass, heroin, hash, and whatever. Make them illegal. Well, I think the Government can’t see its way clear to making them illegal because there is one hell of a lot of tax money coming in to the Government on the sale of cigarettes. The Government is making a lot of money on cigarettes right now – and who knows what the state and local governments are making on their taxes? The Government is a beneficiary of cigarette advertising. And this is the double standard.
The networks’ giving up cigarette advertising is a joke. The networks are saying, ‘Right, no more commercials.’ But the reason is simple economics. The pressure had been great on the stations to run the American Cancer Society freebies. They’ve had to give up so much time from their programs that it no longer becomes economically feasible for them to continue to carry cigarette advertising. The networks can’t keep carrying cigarette advertising and then give equal time to the anti-cigarette advertising and still stay in business. To get out of this bind, they’re giving up the cigarette business.
If advertising agencies are such seducers, if they sway so many people to buy cigarettes, how come they can’t sway people to stop smoking with anti-smoking campaigns? You either have a right to smoke or you don’t. Either make it illegal or leave it alone. But enough of the double standard. Grass is illegal. Doctors are saying that maybe it’s dangerous, maybe it isn’t. The Government is sure – they say it’s illegal, and depending upon where you are you can be put away for a long time for using it or selling it. In 1969 they held a rock festival at Bethel, New