It is a sweet irony that Big Tobacco is paying $1.5 billion through 2003 for the American Legacy Foundation to air public service announcements slagging it off daily. It’s turnabout and that has legally been determined to be fair play.According to Dr Cheryl Healton, the foundation’s president and chief executive officer, these commercials represent an effort to combat corporate tobacco’s “feel good, corporate citizen” image.”It is intended to be a wake-up call to America about the fact that 500,000 people die prematurely a year due to tobacco use in America — 50,000 of those die from the tobacco use of others,” said Healton in a CNN interview. “Corporate citizen notwithstanding, a heck of a lot of Americans are dying prematurely due to this product.”Simply speaking, it is a propaganda campaign to combat the propaganda campaign of an industry with very deep pockets. Irony is nothing new to those of us addicted to tobacco who routinely try to quit. You know the people I’m talking about. They smoke for 20 years and then kick it for two weeks and suddenly they are anti-smoking zealots. My grandmother had been smoking since Taft was president. One week, her pastor talked her into quitting and suddenly anyone who sat in her nicotine-stained kitchen got an earful about how bad smoking was for you.As an on-again, off-again smoker since I was 18, I know full well what a hypocrite I can be. I can smoke a pack a day for two years, quit for one year and rail against the system that got me hooked. Then one night at a bar I light up “just one.” Next day I go back on the wagon for three months before I fall off for another year and a half. One long smoking binge is followed by a period of almost monastic abstinence and the end result is I’ve got more personalities living inside me than Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman and Sybil combined.They are merging, however. I don’t flip-flop as much as I used to because nowadays, even when I smoke, I feel guilty about it. I have gotten to the miserable point where I don’t remember what I ever liked about smoking. I get the jones real bad and get my fix, and rarely does it even feel good.I don’t want to smoke, but it is so easy to get hooked and re-hooked, time and again. I cannot be one of these brash, proud-to-be-inhalin’ smokers who talks about lighting up as though it were a right of birth.The fact is, those anti-smoking commercials, though heavy on the propaganda, are essentially correct. Only 20 years ago, they would have been laughable. Today they are well received. We all accept that smoking is bad ,and if a heavy dose of intensely emotional imagery will keep kids from making the same mistake many of us made in our younger days then that’s great. If the tobacco companies have to pay for it — all the better.Joe Camel may be the most insidious of all tobacco company creations. This loveable cartoon character has little appeal to adults. He was always there to make sure children learned brand recognition well-before they were legally able to smoke. I know when I went out to buy my first pack of smokes to irritate my roommate, I looked at the many brands in the cigarette machine in the USAC laundry within easy reach of the playground and I just knew Marlboro was the brand I wanted. Reds, just like the cowboy whose face graced so many billboards back home you couldn’t cross the Missouri in any direction on any bridge without seeing his weather-worn face and appreciating his rugged individualism.Of course, that cowboy died of lung cancer, a fact not widely known until the American Legacy Foundation began running commercials featuring the cowboy’s brother — a man whose piece was long overdue for airing.I guess there is a fine line between rugged individualism and fatalism.Smokers are not an oppressed subclass, but their numbers — our numbers — are dwindling. I for one cannot wait until the day when it is as unnecessary to post “no smoking” signs in restaurants as it is to post “no spitting” signs. At this rate, public smoking bans will be unnecessary in five years. In fact, public bans will be the one thing that will keep people defiantly puffing themselves to death. Prohibition not only did nothing to stop Americans from drinking, it fueled a criminal subculture that still exists in America.Cities need to relax and wait for the inevitable because nothing prolongs the inevitable like resistance. I know I need to quit. Every smoker in the United States knows they need to quit. But the decision must be one of free choice. We already have the effective propaganda machine rolling; let’s leave the brown shirt tactics of public bannings to less sophisticated states like California.I may seem torn, sometimes I feel like it. But wanting to see the tobacco companies run aground while not wanting to see public smoking bans take effect are two ideas I am comfortable holding at the same time.Be patient. It will happen naturally. Slowly, but naturally.Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English. he is opinion editor of the Daily.