See our smoking zoo

By Bob Greene

The smoking kiosks at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport - if they last - will be instructive to archeologists in future generations who will be trying to figure out how America changed.

The smoking kiosks - 15 have been built by the City of Chicago, a total of 21 are planned, at a cost of $214,000 - are the last places that smokers can smoke at O'Hare. The kiosks are outside of the airport building itself. A person who wants a cigarette must leave the building, find a kiosk, and then puff away while other travelers look on disapprovingly.

Some critics believe that the city should not be encouraging smoking by constructing these kiosks. But unless a smoker is a member of one of the airlines' private clubs inside O'Hare - where there are smoking sections - that smoker has nowhere to go. It's really rather pathetic - the smokers herded into the little kiosks, for all the world to cluck at.

It wasn't so long ago that airports - like all public buildings and office buildings - were filled with a haze of smoke, as were airplanes. The smoking sections and no-smoking sections of commercial flights were separated by an invisible wall, a wall that didn't really exist. Now if you light up on a flight you just may find yourself arrested at the other end - if your fellow passengers haven't taken justice into their own hands first. It is one of U.S. history's most amazing shifts in the way people lead their lives - this shift from smoking being considered an all-American social activity to smokers being separated from everyone else, ostracized, pitied.

And it's about to get even more pronounced. By the time the big cigarette companies work out a compromise deal with the government, any person who buys cigarettes can expect a tiny federal agent to hop out of the cigarette pack when it is opened and make sure the smoker doesn't do his or her smoking anywhere it might conceivably bother anyone else.

O'Hare's smoking kiosks are outside because no one in authority wanted to allow them inside. Similar kiosks are inside some airports; you walk past the smokers on your way to your flight, and the kiosks look like zoos of scorn, with people on display like transgressors in an old-time town square. The days when the most beautiful and glamorous movie stars lit up cigarettes on screen as a sign of sophistication and worldliness seem like something out of the caveman era.

Smoking has turned into such borderline behavior that at O'Hare, a person isn't even allowed to step outside and smoke in the open air, as is the case at office buildings. Last spring, smoking was banned on the upper-level roadway of the airport so that smokers wouldn't throw their butts over the railing and hit passengers below.

Thus, the kiosks - the little smoking zoos. Even people who smoke these days often lament their state, saying they wish they weren't hooked on it. It makes those of us who don't smoke curious about whether there are still a lot of people who smoke not because they are addicted to it, but because they feel it gives them pure pleasure and enjoyment. (If smokers who love smoking want to write letters to this column explaining the romance of it all, we'll print some of the results.)

In the current American smoking climate, it is increasingly difficult to take seriously the tobacco industry's claims that it is not intentionally recruiting young people to smoke. Logic would seem to dictate that young people are, in fact, the only hope the tobacco companies have. How many 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds do you think are going to wake up some bright summer morning and say to themselves: "You know, I think this is the day I'm going to take up smoking!"

No, if the cigarette-makers have any hope of staying alive, their future is in young people - which, in a way, is lucky for the tobacco companies, because young people are the only ones who can routinely delude themselves into thinking it's a sign of significant rebellion to do something - such as smoking - that society disapproves of.

Matter of fact, those pitiful kiosks at O'Hare may turn into the most cutting-edge gathering spots in Chicago - sort of like alternative nightclubs for the disaffected.

"What do you want to do tonight?" "Go out to the smoking zoos at O'Hare."

"Awesome."