ALL PUFFED UP

I haven’t quite figured out how cigar smoking got taken over by Wall Street types who wear red suspenders. I haven’t figured it out partly because I don’t like to think about it. I don’t like to think about it because I’m afraid I’ll start wallowing in nostalgia for the days back in Kansas City when stogies were smoked by people like my cousin Sam, a man who played in the American Legion drum-and-bugle corps and never heard of a power breakfast.

I hasten to say that I am not bringing this up out of concern for the health of Wall Street types who wear red suspenders. I hasten to say that because they’re always quick to respond to such expressions of concern with a lot of hot air about how the New Puritans have tried to rob independent-minded (and maybe even dashing) Americans of their freedoms. If the health of Wall Street types who wear red suspenders was high on my list of worries, I would have long ago devoted some attention to studies indicating that wearing red suspenders, instead of a belt, lowers your sperm count.

My cousin Sam probably had his faults; I’m aware that people with discerning ears for music might have included the American Legion drum-and-bugle corps in this category. But if his wife, my cousin Min, ever told him to get that smelly cigar out of the house, I can’t imagine that his response would have been to start kvetching about smokers being oppressed. As I understand the customs of American Legion members in Sam’s era, the acceptable response to Min’s request would have been to go out on the porch with the cigar or to tell Min to shut her trap. The New Puritanism wouldn’t have come into it.

One way to figure this, I know, is that cigar smoking follows logically from wine drinking for people who want to demonstrate that they’ve arrived: one more habit that’s expensive and lends itself to pedantry. That view is supported by a recent advertisement for the magazine Cigar Aficionado, which lists among the subjects discussed in the current issue “the expensive gamble of owning thoroughbred racehorses, the mystique of a Savile Row suit and a blind tasting of 83 maduros.”

In other words, Cigar Aficionado can be seen as Martha Stewart Living for males, a guidebook for the man who is not quite secure about whether he has truly become what used to be called in my high school a suave dog (with “suave” pronounced, of course, as if it rhymed with “wave”).

Someone who is analytically inclined, I realize, would maintain that red suspenders and cigars, one formerly associated with firemen and the other with people like fight managers, have a significant connection. Is it an accident, he’d ask, that people who make their living fiddling with money, an enterprise traditionally considered effete compared with manufacturing a decent American widget, have taken on the symbols of tough guys?

One problem I have with that approach is that the Wall Street types who wear red suspenders and smoke cigars don’t necessarily work on Wall Street; some of them just want to look like Michael Douglas in the movie. Another problem I have with it is that my normal response to hearing the analytically inclined ask whether something is an accident is to say, “Yeah, probably.”

That attitude makes me equally skeptical about the possibility that this all has to do with sex. After all, even Freud may have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” To which Jung may or may not have added, “Sometimes it’s an affectation.” To which my cousin Sam would have said, “Or a stogie, bozo.”