Aside from the maudlin pleasure of visiting Fitzgerald’s grave every few years, I find the idea of spending time in Rockville on the same level of pleasure with picking lice off the back of a psychotic orangutan.

I’ve got an urge to visit Maryland’s largest non-town now, though, and I’m taking a carton of Chesterfields. I know that nice people do not walk and smoke at the same time, but I am going to march through that nest of self-righteous prigs and smoke myself senseless. Or, at least I would if they hadn’t ripped up all the sidewalks years ago to install malls, access roads and parking decks.

I’m not a shill for Liggett and Myers–I’ve never forgiven them for abandoning Richmond–but Montgomery County has just banned smoking in restaurants and bars. If New York and California want to do so, fine, but this is Maryland, which was to a great extent built on tobacco. (For California; it’s just sort of a joke; they choke the atmosphere with car exhaust but cigarette smoke is Pee Yew Nasty!)

Montgomery County has gone from aw-shucks farmland to an SUV disaster within the space of two generations. Once content with its sleepy backwater status, it has managed to get overrun by thousands of professional whiners with six-figure salaries. Terrified by the idea of living in Washington itself, they whine that the Baltimore symphony doesn’t play in Montgomery, whine that their tax dollars are going to support Baltimore City and less-affluent Prince George’s County. They’ve fled the city pavement for a place in what used to be country, but then whine that it takes too long to get to work and pout until the state paves over some more country to make an eight lane expressway for them.

I’ll be the first to admit that a smoke-filled room is not always the most desirable place to be. However, being an occasionally-efficient sort, if I see a bar that’s too smoky, or too sleazy, or too anything for my taste–I just don’t go into it.

Montgomery has been a smarmy little know-it-all of a county for twenty-odd years, but this is just too much. She is now that horrid little girl we all knew in the fifth grade who told the teacher if she saw someone passing notes. Worse, Frederick and Howard now seem to be the horrid little girl’s accomplices (she always DID have a couple of followers. Too bad none of the other twenty counties will dunk their pigtails in ink.)

This sort of thing is the worst example of a nanny state. As far as I’m concerned the government is there to print the money and deliver the mail. Right now, it’s not managing to deliver the mail very effectively, but it’s doing a bang-up job of telling me what to do. The American people just never do seem to get that morality isn’t a matter of simple legislation.

I’m starting to believe that Americans really just aren’t happy unless they’re miserable, and they’re only really happy if they’re making someone else miserable. We’re going to be good, pure, devout, hardworking people and damnit, so are you!

If I decide to protest in Montgomery, I’ll first have to find three square feet to stand upon that hasn’t been eaten up by on-ramps. Montgomery’s problem will then arise: who to send to chide me for smoking in public? Do they send a cop, a Baptist preacher, a health inspector, a lobbyist, or a teary-eyed activist? By the time they’ve figured it out I’ll have polluted all of their fern bars and retreated to alcoholic, sinful and nictotine-addled Baltimore.