Spare us from the sanctimonious puritans who would have us all live risk free lives
Monday, January 11, 2016 at 11:50 I've just seen an email sent to Forest.
Subject heading: 'David Bowie'.
It reads:
Keep up your good work :(
Oddly enough someone with the same name wrote to the Guardian in 2001 following the death of George Harrison.
The original letter doesn't seem to be online but it generated this response:
I think x will find it is beagles who are forced to smoke, not Beatles.
There may be a gap of 15 years but I'm guessing the email and letter were written by the same person.
It says everything about the anti-smoking mindset that there are people who instead of celebrating the life of a remarkable showman/artist can't wait to comment – indirectly – on that person's lifestyle and attack those who believe everyone should have the freedom to make informed choices.
I don't know what caused the cancer that killed Bowie – perhaps he was just unlucky – and on this of all days it seems inappropriate and distasteful to even speculate.
But I do know this. Bowie made the most of his 69 years and if that included a tendency to take risks (personally and professionally) without harming anyone else then it was no-one's business but his own.
If you celebrate someone's life you have to celebrate everything about them because that's who they were.
Meanwhile spare us from the sanctimonious puritans who would have us all live 'healthy' risk free lives.
Reader Comments (9)
David Bowie paid for the education and upbringing of Marc Bolan's son who was left in poverty after his father died.
Apparently, Rolan Bolan had never met Bowie, and had never been able to thank him, but were it not for this amazing musician and close friend of Marc Bolan, he would not have had the life he did.
Bowie may have been a smoker but he had far more humanity than the smokerphobic antis looking to celebrate the death of anyone who smokes just so they can say : "Told you so - ahahahahahahahaha"
I hate them. They don't care about people or people's lives. They are mean spirited and nasty phobics with personality disorders. In honour of the good guys like Bowie, I'll light up a fag and down a bottle of wine in memory of a great musician who came to fame at a time when we were free and didn't have to ask puritans for the right to breathe.
doesnt surprise me. anti's are filled with things much more dangerous than cigarette smoke.. bile, hatred, intolerance for anything they disagree with, and of course cowardice. lots of cowardice :(
David Bowie quit smoking years ago...just sayin'.
At least Simon Chapman's refrained from commenting.
'I'll light up a fag and down a bottle of wine in memory of a great musician who came to fame at a time when we were free and didn't have to ask puritans for the right to breathe.'
Some of us are so, so, lucky to have been the right age at the right time ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXq5VvYAI1Q
Just the tip of a very deep iceberg. Bowie and so many others
What a really sad and hateful comment! It's also grossly inaccurate as smoking has never been demonstrated to be the cause of any cancer (or any other disease for that matter). Smoking has been associated as a risk factor for lung cancer for example, however non-smokers also get lung cancer and the incidence of cancer in non-smokers is rising. Gloating about someone's death to make political points is reprehensible.
I too understood that Bowie had actually given up smoking some while before (before, note, not after) his heart attack. So if one wants to go all “statistics” on this sad event, this great man has actually added to the already-growing number of non-smokers now contracting and, sadly often dying from, cancer.
It’s also notable how silent these nasties are when one of their clean-living, risk-averse, muesli-crunching, street-pounding, conformist friends drops dead with a heart attack or who develops cancer (or some other “smoke-attributed” disease). I guess they just put that down to “bad luck,” then, eh?
He succumbed to liver cancer.
Not something that's routinely claimed to be caused by smoking.
Some do seem to revel in hearing about the premature death of smokers/ex-smokers. I suspect these types (including so-called experts) smugly celebrate when 'studies' link smoking and illness.
600,000 people, give or take a few, die every year in the UK. Some of them smoke, most of them don't. But if they smoked, even if they lived to be ninety five, it were the fags that did it. Such is the modern mind set.
And as for those, toes curled, who never indulged in any fashionable sin?
The experts are still working on that but, in the interim, keep banging the 'smoking kills' drum.
All the rest live forever.
So they would have us all think.
It makes you despair. A man's death, any mans death, should diminish you. It is not a time to crow.