But there is a third variable at work, one I alluded to already. Cigars arouse passions in people. Those who hate them tend to stay away from them. So when you smoke one, you are either left alone to your own enjoyment or surrounded by kindred spirits who share your passion. I cannot stand it when people smoke cigars in mixed company just to prove they can, or in some other way pretend they are sticking it to the Man. One does not have to subscribe to the cultivated hysteria about secondhand smoke to understand that smoking in front of people who do not wish to be around smoke is rude. Life is too short, and cigars are too expensive, to smoke them for any reason other than enjoyment.

I am a conservative in large part because I believe that politics should intrude on life as little as possible. Conservatives surely believe that there are times when the government should meddle in the daily affairs of the people, but they normally reserve those times for large questions of right and wrong, good and evil. Most conservatives, for instance, may want to restrict abortion on grounds rooted in the Decalogue, but few want the government to stop you from drinking raw milk. So much of liberalism is about unleashing the Joy Police on us, politicizing our prosaic wants and desires because some expert somewhere thinks he or she knows better how to live your life than you do. The result is to scrub the Hobbit warrens of our daily lives of the simple pleasures and to make many of those simple pleasures “political” even when properly speaking they are not.