Politics & Power Quote by Joe Eszterhas

Eszterhas frames a private addiction as a public protest, which is exactly the sleight of hand that makes the line revealing. Calling himself a "militant smoker" borrows the language of ideology and struggle to elevate a habit into an identity. It turns nicotine into a badge: not just something he did, but something he defended. The phrase "politically correct" does heavy lifting, too. It’s a catch-all villain, vague enough to absorb any grievance and broad enough to suggest a cultural orthodoxy with its own enforcers.

"Big brother assault" is the tell. He’s not arguing about health data; he’s narrating a siege. The subtext is less "I like smoking" than "you can’t tell me what to do". That’s an emotionally legible posture in a late-20th-century America where public-health campaigns, indoor smoking bans, and changing norms recast smoking from glamorous to antisocial. For someone steeped in Hollywood’s old iconography - cigarettes as shorthand for cool, rebellion, sophistication - the crackdown can feel like a stripping of cultural status. Eszterhas compensates by recoding stigma as persecution.

There’s also a writer’s instinct at work: conflict sells, and he casts himself as the protagonist against faceless bureaucrats. But the defensive rhetoric gives away its own vulnerability. If smoking were just pleasure, it wouldn’t need the armor of politics. The quote exposes how easily personal compulsion recruits grand narratives, especially when the culture finally stops flattering it.