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Watching The Crown With Horror and Disgust
What’s horrifying isn’t the treatment of Diana, but how much people used to smoke.
Smoking cigarettes is disgusting. If you want to be seen as déclassé, just light up a Marlborough and watch the stares and appalled gasps. If you decide to actually do this, you could probably get away with it on the patio of a donut shop or greasy spoon in a small town. That is pretty much the only acceptable context for sucking tobacco smoke into your lungs without incurring outraged disapproval and courting suspicion that you are, if not an actual criminal, then someone not to be trusted around children or pets.
It didn’t always use to be like this.
There was a time when smoking cigarettes, cigars, and pipes was glamorous and classy. The king of England was a smoker, back in the twentieth century. Just watch the first season of The Crown. Spoiler alert: he dies of lung cancer in the season finale, although his family blames his death on his older brother’s abdication of the throne.
His death did not deter his daughter, Princess Margaret, from smoking. She also died prematurely of lung cancer while her nonsmoking older sister lives on year after year, making Prince Charles’ eventual coronation more and more of a future anticlimax.
