The cigar, revisited.

Mr. Rusher, NR's former publisher, is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute.

IN THE special section on "Pleasure & Its Perils" in the May 1 issue of NATIONAL REVIEW, our young literary editor, David Klinghoffer, took a swing at "pretended pleasures." He cites two well-known examples: one (the "white lie," as in "Doesn't the bride look lovely?") that he approves, and one (which might be called the "white laugh," since it involves laughing at a joke that isn't funny) about which he is somewhat more reserved.

Then he goes on to scorn -- quite properly, in my opinion -- those who pretend to virtue by admiring what is not admirable but only fashionable (bad foreign films, for example), or by "abstaining from anything that might prematurely deprive [them] of life in this world: fatty foods, booze, and, above all, cigarettes." That sets him up for his final fusillade against water bars, coffee bars, and similar establishments that replace "the old-fashioned, sinful kind of bar where alcohol and tobacco are ingested."

But then Mr. Klinghoffer makes a fatal misstep, complaining that in Manhattan "The first restaurant for cigar smokers has already opened. . . . Today, one chooses . . . not a cigarette (which is inhaled) but a cigar (which is not). . . . In sticking to safe pleasures such as a cigar, and extolling them as if they were the real thing, a person declares his allegiance to the leading ideology of the day: . . . secular left-liberalism, which took God from us and now seeks to take away even the consolation of genuine pleasure."

Cigars "not the real thing"? David, my boy, you have a lot to learn.

First, let's dispose of the notion that the pleasure of a good cigar must be faked because a cigar isn't inhaled. It's true that a cigar smoker doesn't (simply because he can't) inhale the way a cigarette smoker does: drawing huge billows of smoke into his mouth and thence directly into his lungs, to be exhaled in a great white cloud. Cigar smoke is stronger and thicker than cigarette smoke, and inhaling it that way is simply an invitation to choke.

But watch a cigar smoker carefully. He will draw smoke from the cigar into his mouth, exhale it gently, and then -- when it has mixed with the air -- inhale a portion of the mixture into his lungs, thereafter exhaling it quietly and almost invisibly. And the air around him will remain perfumed with cigar smoke, and available for further inhalation, almost until he draws on the cigar again.

In other words, the whole point of smoking a cigar is to savor its aroma and flavor, gentled by the air (and, of course to obtain the agreeable "nicotine fix" that all tobacco provides). There is nothing "pretended" about it. As a matter of fact, I would argue that smoking a good cigar is one of the most superbly sensual pleasures known to man. (And perhaps spiritual too -- a priest I know calls a cigar "a sacrament.")

What's more, just now -- right at the apogee of the national anti- smoking hysteria, when everyone's hand is turned against them -- cigars are making a comeback in the United States that deserves to be called historic. The broader cause is a pronounced upswing in the number of men who have decided to spend a little money on enjoying themselves before they die; but the immediate precipitating factor is a new quarterly magazine called Cigar Aficionado, published by Marvin Shanken, who also publishes The Wine Spectator.

Shanken is a journalistic genius who is well on his way to cornering the market in magazines catering to those in search of self-indulgent luxury. Simply to thumb through his two publications, reading the come-hither articles and looking at the ads (for everything from humidors to yachts), is to be introduced to a world of unrepentant enjoyment.

Cigar Aficionado was launched only about three years ago, but it has already led to a humongous boom in cigar sales -- above all, in sales of the very best cigars. Cigar purveyors are being swamped with orders they cannot fill for months; cigar manufacturers are stepping up production as fast as they can, all too aware that they dare not sacrifice quality lest they ruin the reputation of their finest products. Predictably, cigar prices are going through the roof. But nobody seems to care.

On April 19 every one of the 31 Ritz Carlton Hotels in the world participated in an "International Cigar Celebration," in the form of a sumptuous black-tie dinner (at $200 a plate) from which those attending took away (if they had not already smoked) eight superb cigars, including a Temple Hall Belicoso, a Partagas Limited Reserve, and a Macanudo Prince of Wales. I was number 54 on the waiting list for the affair at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton until a well-connected friend took pity on me and pulled the necessary strings.

Telling the two hundred guests at that dinner (most of them not old fogies like myself, but young San Francisco businessmen clearly on their way up) that they were proclaiming their "allegiance to the leading ideology of the day: . . . secular left-liberalism" would have invited either hilarity or fisticuffs. I doubt that anybody there was to the left of Newt Gingrich.

Like anything else, cigars can be overdone. One could, I am sure, smoke too many. (I recently heard of one nonagenarian who has cut back from twenty a day to eight.) And lately, as a result of Marvin Shanken's indefatigable promotion of their pleasures (and perhaps in an attempt to justify the resulting prices), efforts to describe the ineffable characteristics of particular cigars have begun to display the metaphorical excess that has long bedeviled the description of fine wines: e.g., "filled with cocoa and coffee-bean flavors backed up by smooth woody and leathery notes" (Cigar Aficionado, Spring 1995).

But these are quibbles. In the context of contemporary American culture, a good cigar is almost as eloquent as those little American flags that so many of us wore on our lapels in the early 1970s. It proclaims, first of all, that one is an individualist, not easily lured into the deadening conformity of cigarettes -- or, worse yet, into the smug self-righteousness of the health fascists of the anti-smoking brigade. It asserts, second, that the cigar-smoker believes in pleasure, is ready to seek it and spend money on it, and takes time to smell, if not the flowers, then at least the seductive aromas of the humidor. Finally, by its historic identification with good food, it speaks also of a high regard for the delights of the table.

"Allegiance to secular left-liberalism"? David, what do you think are passed at Bill Buckley's home, after one of Pat's magnificent dinners? What can you hear interfering, every so often, with Rush Limbaugh's enunciation as he sits there at the microphone lecturing his troops? De gustibus non est disputandum. But for me, at least, when I have finished lunch and settled into my favorite leather armchair at my club, the Cigar Hour that follows (best of all, of course, with a new issue of NR to read) is the very quintessence of felicity -- and of conservatism.