Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 36

Phillip Morris.  R. J. Reynolds.

 

Competing denominations of the same religion.

 

Which is to say the religion of angel making.  Churches who took the doctrine of the Good Book – dust unto dust – quite literally in forming their religion. 

 

A religion dedicated to many things, but above all the conversion of men and women to dust. 

 

And though both denominations are dedicated to the cause let it be known it is R. J. Reynolds who’s made the most angels.

 

Because R. J. Reynolds’s sermonized cigarettes would become the greatest angel makers of all time.  50 years before Mary Poppins would teach us all ‘a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’ R. J. Reynolds had already learnt the lesson.  You see, sugared tobacco has a transmutative power coveted by Jesus Christ himself.  It takes a doctrine that’s very hard to swallow and makes it easy to inhale.  Yes, R. J. Reynolds’s and his candied tobacco figured out how to get his religion into people’s lungs, not just their mouths.  Convert a man’s mouth and they’ll sing your hymns.  Convert a man’s lungs and he’ll give you every last breath he’s got. 

 

But religion, as in life, is as much discovered by pure happenstance and chance.  The specific valence of sugar-soaked tobacco opening the floodgates on folk’s lungs is owing to a strange, sad, and singular fact - an aspect of R. J. Reynolds’s American heritage.  One the janitor is about to harp on -

 

Because pound for pound sugar was cheaper than tobacco.