Articles Analysis (Essay Sample)

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Should one vice justify the other?
Jeff Jacoby’s piece titled ‘zealots start new war on smokers’ is a humorous, witty piece at best and a poorly written baseless campaign for smokers at worst. I say humorous because some of the arguments made by the writer are so preposterous that the reader has to assume that the writer was aiming for the funny bone because the alternative is that he thinks his readers are nitwits. He makes numerous arguments which are weak at best, but they do garner points for ingenuity. One does not need to read the whole article to know that Jeff has taken up the war against smoking right back to the legislators. The title says it all. A simpler word such as fanatics or extremists would have sufficed but none would communicate Jeff’s feelings as well as zealots does. This is used to express the way the legislators supposedly go above and beyond to oppress smokers. After such a strong argumentative title, it comes as a disappointment that Jeff’s first issue with anti-smoking in public areas law is its lack of originality. This should clearly be a non-issue as nothing under the sun is ever really new. Even the greatest of ideas are the duplication or repackaging of old ideas. He follows this up with well-aimed ridicule that likens the legislators to nannies. This is to discredit their opinions as uninformed and whimsical.
Jeff Jacoby’s next argument is that it s not the duty of the council to protect the general public from ‘any conceivable annoyance’. He claims that if someone is in a beach where there is a smoker and one is irritated, one might as well move to another beach. He likens the banning of smokers to the banning of noisy children and trashy dress from parks. This of course is wrong as it implies that it is the inherent nature of people to smoke just as children are not children unless they are noisy. Trashy dress on the other hand is another issue altogether. If a neighbor wore a trashy dress to the park, I doubt I would get a life threatening disease like say lung cancer from her proximity to me. By likening the choice to smoke in public to the choice to dress trashy in public, the author is in effect trying rather unsuccessfully to merge ideas that are as different as the psychologies and the motivations behind them. But would trashy dressing ever justify public smoking? That is like trying to say that were rape made legal, that would be grounds to make homicides legal. A vice is a vice. We cannot justify one vice by citing that which is legal. The best any well-meaning citizen should do is to seek for the legal vice to be illegalized. Never the other way round.
Jeff continues his crusade by citing that alcoholics are not as demonized as smokers are yet alcohol is more harmful than tobacco. This argument completely overlooks the fact that alcohol hardly ever infringes a neighbor’s enjoyment of his rights as smoking does. The only time that argument would be applicable is if alcohol produced pungent vapors that made neighbors involuntarily drunk. (See what I did there? Asinine argument.) If equal measures were to be used, then smokers should be prohibited from driving at some point just as drinkers are. Crudity of language is the other issue Jeff raises. The nannies, have tried to monitor this vice rather unsuccessfully as seen in the nomination of a crude-words-laden song to the Grammy awards list. It bears noting that the Grammy awards are an authority on musical prowess and not on morality. Just because a song is on the nominee list does not make it the go-to teenage bible. What Jeff should do is petition the awards committee not to accept any songs that would otherwise impress badly on highly impressionable minds. This will ensure that vulgarities remain as unused in the center as cigarettes are.
Jeff presents himself as a widely read and well educated person. This can be seen in the use of large words such as nonchalant, ubiquitous, pieties, asinine and zealots (just to name the easier ones) that no layman would use even in an essay. After attacking the legislators who came up with the anti-smokers bills, he wisely introduces h...