Smoking Avatar Poem by gershon hepner

If I were an avatar,
I don’t think that I’d want to smoke,
my fear of cancer-causing tar
that causes those who smoke to croak.
before their designated time
would make me hesitate to puff
on cigarettes, and that’s why I’m
suggesting that a pinch of snuff
would have been more appropriate
for Sigourney Weaver when
she saves Pandora. Though too late
to save the world from smoking men,
she flouts advice the Surgeon General
gives everyone who’s as addicted
to smokes as to Pandora’s mineral
earth men clearly are depicted,
creating avatars. Though I
am one ins some way, by my wife
controlled, I do not want to die
in her snuff movie either. Life
is too exciting to relinquish
for a high induced by nic-
otine, nor would she, so I think, wish
me to be made by gaspers sick.
Because I am her avatar,
I’ll stick, while I am fresh and frisky,
to my cigar that’s no cigar,
unsingle as a malted whisky.

Inspired by the movie “Avatar, ” in which the environmental scientist played by Sigourney Weaver smokes cigarettes while programming avatars in an effort to save Pandora sometime in the 22nd century (see Michael Cieply, “‘Avatar’ Joins Holiday Movies That Fail an Antismoking Test, ” NYT, January 4,2010) :
Some of those who oppose smoking in movies have just seen the future, and they are not happy about it. Having caught up with James Cameron’s 3-D science fiction thriller, “Avatar, ” over the holidays, Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, said his Smoke Free Movies initiative would soon come out swinging with an informational campaign aimed at what he saw as the movie’s pro-smoking message. “This is like someone just put a bunch of plutonium in the water supply, ” Mr. Glantz said in a telephone interview last week. He was referring to scenes in which an environmental scientist played by Sigourney Weaver drags lovingly on a cigarette as she works to save the moon Pandora sometime in the 22nd century. Scenesmoking.org, which monitors tobacco mentions in films, gave the PG-13 rated “Avatar” a rating of its own: A “black lung.” Still, Mr. Cameron’s movie, distributed by 20th Century Fox, is not the only holiday picture to earn that distinction, which indicates unacceptable depictions of tobacco. “Sherlock Holmes” and “The Blind Side, ” which were distributed by Warner Brothers; “Nine, ” from the Weinstein Company; “Did You Hear About the Morgans? ” from Sony Pictures; and “The Fantastic Mr. Fox, ” also from Fox, were similarly rated with a “black lung” for tobacco use, even though they carried a rating of PG-13 or PG from the film industry’s Classification and Rating Administration. In a statement sent by e-mail over the weekend, Mr. Cameron said he had never intended Ms. Weaver’s character, Grace Augustine, to be “an aspirational role model” for teenagers. “She’s rude, she swears, she drinks, she smokes, ” wrote Mr. Cameron. “Also, from a character perspective, we were showing that Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”

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