When one of my daughters was 12, it was time to teach her the facts of life. I took her out on the front porch to teach her how to smoke a cigar.

I didn’t intend to teach the girl any other facts of life, of course. As a dad, that wasn’t my job.

Like all cigar smokers, and especially the occasional kind, I treasured this big ritual. You light the cigar in a certain way, which isn’t as hard as they pretend – the thing is designed to burn, you know. Then you keep it lit, which isn’t hard, either – it’s not like keeping smoked salmon lit. Then you puff on it, which is harder than it sounds – it’s not natural to put smoke in your mouth, and it’s even less natural to pretend you enjoy it.

Like other rituals, cigar smoking is best if you have an audience. It’s something like a preacher in front of his congregation or a professor in front of his class. It’s not as much fun all alone.

In my case, it was a dad in front of his daughter. A middle-aged blow-hard in front of a captive audience with the pretense of educating and the goal of impressing. Sort of like that preacher and that professor.

In the ritual of cigar smoking, the highest achievement is the miracle of blowing smoke rings. They look difficult, and they are.  

A half hour into our dad/daughter porch lesson on cigar smoking, I started blowing smoke rings. Big beautiful ones. I wasn’t able to make shapes other than rings – no pirate ships or dragons – but the rings were pretty good ones. The daughter was duly impressed.

Ah, but smoke rings pit two of cigar-smoking rules against one another. The first rule is, smoke rings are cool. The second rule is, don’t inhale. (Bill Clinton’s smoking rituals come to mind, but that’s another column.)

You see, a smoke ring requires a fair quantity of smoke, sometimes more than a mouthful. But if you inhale cigar smoke into your lungs, well, bad things can happen.

And they did. After 20 minutes of impressive smoke rings on the porch, I went down to the lawn and puked my guts out. To this day, my daughter credits me with an ingenious lesson to teach her the perils of smoking.

If only I’d been that ingenious, rather than that stupid. But I’ll take the credit. To this day, the daughter doesn’t smoke, anything.

And so, here we are in America circa 2026, blowing smoke rings. We don’t call them that, of course. Just as “smoke rings” is a euphemism for inhaling into your lungs the hot ash of burning vegetable compost in order to make a show of a small and arbitrary talent, we’ve invented euphemisms.  

There’s the euphemism of “Balancing Work with Life.” This euphemism is more tempting than breathing burning vegetable compost, because it treats work as a vice and laziness as a virtue.

But this nice-sounding euphemism (who can object to balance?) is designed to obscure a basic human weakness: laziness. A corollary could be “The Road to Happiness is Paved with Pleasure.”  

But it’s not so. Ironically, but predictably, people seduced by this notion that pleasure is the road to happiness are invariably quite unhappy. Doubly ironic is that they blame their unhappiness on their meager work, and so they double down on their goal (to the extend they have goals) of doing less of it.

They get a lot of emotional support in that quest. Many people who “work” eight months a year, to whom we entrust much of our children’s daytime lives, teach and profess this notion that work is unhealthy or even evil for the purpose of validating their own unhappy choices.   

And then there’s the euphemism of “women’s liberation.” Invented by men, this one pretends that free sex for men somehow liberates women.

Yeah, it “liberates” women from men who help raise children, it “liberates” women from men who hang around after the pregnancy occurs, and it “liberates” women from men who are still in bed with them the next morning.  

It would be inequitable for us to forget “equity.” That’s the euphemism that says it’s unfair when the consequences to a person correlate with his efforts and achievements.

And the euphemism of “gender affirmation” as if unhappy men can be transformed into happy women by lopping off their genitals.

And the euphemism of “DEI” as if racial discrimination is right, not wrong, so long as the chosen races are the right ones, not the wrong ones.

All this euphemistic pleasure-seeking and virtue-signaling has replaced values that humanity held dear for millennia – work, responsibility, dedication, duty, love, commitment, and, yes, truth, justice and beauty.

It makes me want to run out to the lawn to puke my guts out.