To Smoke or Not to Smoke and..............Healthcare

Later last night, I attended this Berlin disco. Pretty big place, two floors on the top of a 15 story office tower. This is the place made infamous in my fifth blog posting. The one at which I arrived on the wrong day. On Str8 night. Anywho, I finally made it back on the appropriate night (Sunday). And, as usual, the Germans were single-handedly keeping American tobacco companies in business. Coming from a country in which so many cities and states have banned in-door smoking (including in clubs), it has been a real adjustment to have smoke always circulating around my head in Berlin. Whether, it be while enjoying an outdoor cafe patio on a beautiful day with my croissant and...........SMOKE. Or whether it's in a club filled with............SMOKE. Smoke in Berlin is like fucking Visa. It's everywhere you wanna be.

Anywho, upon leaving the club..........early................cause I couldn't breathe anymore (actually, it was my lungs that left. No, really. They stomped out under protest and waited, somewhat impatiently, for the rest of my body to follow) and the trains had begun running again (remember dear reader; the trains stop at 1:00 in Berlin between Sun evening and Thur night and they surface again at 4:00 a.m., or thereabouts). On the way out, I happened to ask an elevator of revelers about whether there was any movement afoot to ban smoking in bars in Berlin. Cricket, cricket. Cricket, cricket. The sound of silence at night, in farm country (or sub-burbs, pretty much the same). I might as well not have said anything. People just looked around uncomfortably. Upon exiting the elevator, however, one woman decided to take the bait. It just so happened that she was the DJ for much of the night.

Her contention went as follows. NYC was once a killer place in which to party. Then came the smoking ban. Then came the disneyfication of Times Square. In that order. More precisely, she told me over and over that Berlin liked being a really edgy city and that smoking was an inherent component of that. I mentioned to her that the club at which she'd just finished DJing was not the least bit "edgy" (some seriously cute guys, no doubt; but edgy to the extent designer and gay is edgy, perhaps, but I'm thinkin that's not her definition of edgy). She seemed offended by this. But she recovered and told me where to go for the real Berliner "edgy". Of course it just so happens to be at another club at which she'll be DJing. Sounds like a setup doesn't it.

Anyway, the real question for me regards the possible nexus (calm down you star-trek fans) between laws banning things such as indoor smoking and..............well, Disneyland. On the one hand, the one just doesn't seem to necessarily flow from the other. NYC became Disneyland NOT because of an in-door smoking ban but rather because Giuliani decided that all of the cool sex clubs had to go (Damn). Moreover, the smoking ban (enacted in 2003) was the LAST brick in the Disneyfication edifice that has become NYC, not the first. So, our german femme fatale's description is, at least in the case of her favorite example, NYC, not bourne out by the facts. That said, one wonders what the smokers will do if they cannot smoke in the edgy Berlin clubs? Hmmmmmmmm. Gimme a sec. Hmmmmmm. This is tough. I think I got it. THEY'LL SMOKE THE FUCK OUTSIDE LIKE THEY ALREADY DO ALL THE GODDAMN TIME!!! Yeah, that's what they'll do. And they'll anxiously await the fall of their gloriously edgy night-life. That's at least what I think will happen.