Call the police! Notify the censors! James Bond has been caught smoking a cigar! I mean, who do we get in touch with? We need to send a letter at once to the Department of Role Model Development in the Hollywood Ministry of Socialist Realism! How dare those filmmakers and actors show someone smoking a cigar, we'll demand to know. That scene in the film Die Another Day in which actor Pierce Brosnan enjoys a stogie with some Cuban guys in Havana is a "deadly ploy by the tobacco industry," in the words of Britain's Action on Smoking and Health Group. It's a terrible role model for children, as the American Lung Association points out.

Thank God all the children are busy standing in 45-minute line-ups to see role model Harry Potter whiz around healthily on a magic broom, while their slightly elder siblings are standing in equally long queues to see role model Eminem beat the crap out of people in a Detroit ghetto while his drunk mother has sex with a teenaged boy. Otherwise, they might see James Bond smoking a cigar.

Some other things James Bond does, I've noticed, include speeding, drinking, drag-racing, casually shooting people dead, engaging in premarital and unprotected sex and unrealistically travelling all over the world in unwrinkled suits. But these dangerous and irresponsible behaviours do not appear to have elicited any comment from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the gun-control lobby, Planned Parenthood, the automobile insurance industry or even the Christian Right. Nor have I heard a peep out of Britain's intelligence service, MI6. No one there is protesting that real spies have a fraction as much fun as James Bond and aren't remotely as good-looking as Pierce Brosnan.

Why no peeps and protests? Because all of these people, irrespective of their causes, understand that James Bond is a fantasy figure. You don't have to be Marshall bloody McLuhan to observe that Bond is about as plausible a role model for children as Star Trek's Data. He is an entertainment, and accusing him of smoking a cigar is no less preposterous than accusing Harry Potter of practising witchcraft. Are children now going to demand that snowy owls deliver the mail? No, they are not. Are adolescents going to demand that they, too, be allowed to become spies who drive Ferraris around hair-pin mountain roads at 90 m.p.h. before hang-gliding off the Matterhorn in a tuxedo?

What exactly is the anti-smoking lobby's ideal role model for children, at any rate? Eminem? He is the leading contender at the moment, as far as youth are concerned, because he articulates their sentiments of alienation, rather than their desire to spy on villains, and -- yay! -- he doesn't smoke. He just swears like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and gets busted for illegal gun possession. Is that OK? I am asking quite seriously.

How about Michael Jackson? He doesn't smoke, he just dangles infants out of windows and walks around with a disintegrating nose.

What if you have an alcoholic, anorexic actress who treats her entourage like dirt and can't read anything less facile than Cosmopolitan magazine? Would she do as a suitable role model for children if she thinks smoking is vile?

The problem, here, is that the anti-smoking lobby has completely lost perspective on the validity and sweep of their demands. It is one thing to demand that workplaces be free of second-hand smoke, and another thing entirely to demand that fictional characters in movies adopt an anti-smoking posture while continuing to indulge in every other vice known to humanity short of bestiality, which can only be found on video.

Moreover, if it is health that concerns the anti-smoking lobby, and not just their singular obsession with the tobacco industry, then they must logically demand that fictional characters in movies refrain from everything from drinking gin to engaging in madcap car chases. Fat characters who enjoy their burgers must be banned as bad role models, and so too must thin characters eating too little, and sleep-deprived characters who refuse to get rest.

This is the logic implicit in the anti-smoking lobby's demand, and where it gets them eventually is to socialist realism, where utopian ideals are propagandized and human realities concealed. I had my fill of this when I lived in Moscow in the early 1980s, and saw nothing but brawny, smiling, rosy-cheeked factory workers striding across murals on the walls of the city, above a depressed, vodka-addled, pasty-faced populace standing in line for scarce shipments of condoms and edible bread.