Included among the many sins that I have committed over the decades is 32 years as an adjunct instructor at one university or another. This isn’t the sorry story of a starving graduate student, staggering from campus to campus, trying to earn tenure.
No, it simply went from a little guest lecturing to an invitation to teach one course, once — and then to the realization that while I had no interest in a full-time gig, the part-time academic thing was fun, if I could trick enough deans and department heads into overlooking my lack of a doctorate.
The trick is, you have to fit in. Instead of chatting it up with the academics about the Red Sox or something important, you have to talk like this: “I am not a part of some great symphony, in which I realize myself only as a motif of the whole.” Actually, I didn’t say that. I’m not even sure exactly what that means. The great Harold Laski said it. That’s how you have to talk if you want to fit in and adjunct your way to fame and fortune and the faculty lounge.
I’m cool, I wear tweedy sport jackets. And for many years, I smoked a pipe. The pipe thing was very helpful. When students at several of my less stuffy campuses saw and smelled me, they were inclined to tell me that I reminded them of their grandfather — and that I was very professorial.
The point is, for many years, I was a casual customer in search of pipes. I wasn’t going to prowl the expensive neighborhoods, looking for some $2,500 pipe that made everything taste like ambrosia. I just wanted a few mediocre pipes, one step up from corncob, which would give me the credibility I needed to conquer ignorance and listen to excuses about how the dog ate my homework.
In my consumer research, I found that in the health-foody, trendy, university neighborhoods, drug stores were a perfectly fine place to buy many different kinds of middle-brow pipe tobacco, but they hardly ever carried any pipes. There seemed to be some unease about peddling the delivery system, even as the tobacco sat there behind the cash register, calling your name. It was somewhat akin to a gun shop selling you bullets, but not actually carrying any weapons.
Smoke Rings
This bit of puzzlement came back to me (I’ve sort of moved on to cigars) as I watched all two members of the Needham Board of Health last month ban cigarette sales in drug stores. It occurred to me that Boston had already passed a similar ordinance and maybe that explains the reticence of the pharmacies to cough up, so to speak, a pipe to go with the pipe tobacco.
There’s a school of thought among the Libertarian-conservative types, warning that a government powerful enough to do what you want is also powerful enough to do what you don’t want. Do we want political or administrative bodies deciding whether drug stores can peddle a legal product? The justification seems to be that a drug store selling cancer sticks should have a placard on the front door, “Be warned, ye sick people who enter here; we can cure you or kill you, depending on our inventory.”
You can understand the flip side of the drugstore regulation argument: you don’t want Cohen’s General Store and Muffler Service filling prescriptions. But that seems a bit different than drug stores selling something you can buy at a food store or gas station.
This all seems like a bit of creeping Obamaism. Sure, I will offer you a temporary bailout, but don’t pay your CEO more than a 43 percent premium over the salary of the gum-chewing file clerk on the 23rd floor — and, by the way, it would be better if you held the next business conference in Topeka, because Las Vegas just doesn’t seem right.
There is something sort of cute, of course, about the political notion that drug stores are shrines to good health, clean living, 47 brands of condoms, and the assurance that nothing on the shelves is going to kill you. The gas stations? The convenience stores? Be warned. They’ll sell you anything. n
