provided

The sweeping anti-smoking ban that went into effect in Portugal less than a week ago is a severe, self-inflicted, blow to this utterly conservative country. Just minutes after the law became effective, the director-general of ASAE and chief inspector for the new smoking rules set the stage for a silent rebellion, ostensibly puffing his first cigar of the year in an exotic restaurant at Casino Estoril.

.

Opinion makers and commentators, some of them long term smokers, are raising their voices against the fundamentalism of the new law. And yet, in an apparent paradox, the days before the law became effective it would seem that there was widespread public support for it.

This ambivalence of the Portuguese about tobacco smoking is justified in a country that has more than its share in introducing Western civilization to its modern vices and sins. It was for the Portuguese to introduce tobacco in Europe in the early sixteenth century. They brought it from Brasil. The very active substance of tobacco - nicotine - still bears its Portuguese roots. It derives its name from Jean Nicot (1530-1600; see above), then French ambassador to Lisbon.

Nicot met Damião de Gois in Portugal, a respected scholar and botanical scientist. Gois persuaded the French ambassador of the healing properties of the new plant. Nicot sent it to the French court where it was quite successful in curing Queen Catherine´s migraines. Catherine declared it the "Queen´s Plant". From France, tobacco snuffing, gumming and, later, smoking made its way through the World as a symbol of a healthy good living, compliments of the Portuguese discoverers and traders.

And yet, despite their contributions to civilization, when you visit Portugal for the first time you might be impressed by the overtly critical tone of the Portuguese about themselves and their country. They seem to be constantly complaining, criticizing and protesting against their own fellow citizens and government. They never seem confortable with their country, as they consider it one of the most backward in the World.

The intellectuals, in particular, seem to rejoice in despising their own traditions, and are always fascinated with what comes from abroad, whatever it may be. The Portuguese seem permanently eager for change - reformas, desenvolvimento, modernização -, as they call it. Yet, if you try to suggest them to do things differently, they pause for a moment, and rapidly find an excuse to keep doing things as they ever did.

As for intellectuals, they cannot live long outside their country, suggesting that it is not as bad as they claim. This overcritical tradition by intellectuals goes back several centuries and its symbol is the celebrated writer Eça de Queiroz. It so happens that every critical voice in Portugal that rises above the crowd, and makes it heard sufficiently loud, is deemed, sooner or later, to be elegible for a state-sponsored job (or tacho, as they call it here). In a sense, criticizing the country is a way of living for intellectuals, a true business, like the business of fiscalizing referred to in an earlier post. Needless to say, most intellectuals in the country, like most fiscais, live on government payrolls.

The Portuguese are thus permanently yearning for change, for the foreign and for the new, provided nothing changes around them, or requires them to change. They are used to a small, closely knit society, where everyone knows everybody else and feels protected by all sorts of social networks - family, friends, and, ultimately, government. They are used to enjoying a degree of personal freedom that borders on the obscene of vice and sin. That is why if you question them about banning smoking, now that smoking has been banned almost everywhere in what they consider to be more advanced countries, they will generally answer with an emphatic yes - provided they are themselves allowed to keep smoking.