SMOKING AND SNIFFING

If eating to get high

Pertains to the bureaucratic Kingdom,

And drinking to get high

Pertains to the democratic Church,

Then smoking to get high

Pertains to the autocratic State

And sniffing to get high

Pertains to the theocratic Centre.

Eating and drinking

Are natural and antinatural,

Whereas smoking and sniffing

Are subnatural and supernatural.

If eating is barbarous and drinking civilized,

Then smoking is uncivilized

And sniffing supercivilized.

Human evolution proceeds, we needn't doubt,

From the first to the last,

With all due compromises coming in-between,

And should eventually culminate

In a kind of sniffing absolutism,

With eating, drinking, and smoking

Beneath the pale of its future theocratic integrity.

People of the Centrist civilization

Won't eat and/or drink as freely

As people do in a bureaucratic/democratic society,

But will become increasingly partial

To the use of vitamin tablets and/or capsules ...

As appropriate to an age of sniffing,

An alternative rather than supplement

To natural foods and drinks.

Smoking tobacco will be no less irrelevant

Than drinking alcohol,

And if any smoking were to be permitted

During the lower phase of a Centrist age ...

It could only be in the guise

Of dope-smoking through pipes,

As symptomatic of a pseudo-theocratic bias.