View seven day for previous Winnipeg Free Press stories.
'I love the smell of napalm in the morning," says Robert Duvall's character in the movie Apocalypse Now as smoke drifts over an American military encampment during the Vietnam war. It is not a sentiment that everyone would agree with.
Many who have smelled napalm in use call it a stench, but that's the tricky thing about smells -- whether something is a fragrance, an odour or a stink depends entirely on the personality of the individual nose. There is almost nothing more personal than perfume. There is no real way to determine if it smells good or bad.
What is sweet napalm to one nose is the stink of death to another. A scent that brings one member of the opposite sex running will chase others away as fast as their feet will carry them. A Calgary woman has discovered this truth in a hard way -- she was kicked off a public transit bus twice by two different drivers who objected to what she thought was the delicate fragrance of the perfume she was wearing, but which they considered to be an overpowering stink -- one driver stopped the bus and pointedly opened all the windows before asking her to get off.
It is easy to find this situation amusing, but that's unfair to at least one of the parties concerned or perhaps to both. Everyone has a horror story about the person on the elevator who smells as if he has literally bathed in cologne; and everyone has a matching story of someone who won't tolerate the smell of anything on anybody anywhere at anytime. The question is: Who knows whose nose knows best in a situation like this?
It's a question of some importance, and not just on a Calgary bus. It is an issue that keeps popping up all across the country as increasingly unaccommodating Canadians try to force their views on one another. Blame tobacco for this decline in civility.
The tobacco wars are pretty well over now that smoking has been banned from every public place except the home, the street and federal Crown corporations, but the fragrance wars are just starting. The argument that is suggested is the same -- second-hand odours are harmful to some people's health and simply offensive to others, so fragrances should be banned in public places. It is already happening.
In towns and cities across the country, rules, regulations and laws against the wearing of artificial fragrances are increasingly common. That trend is likely to continue -- the teen-age boy forbidden to wear his Old Spice to a high school dance; the matron denied her Estee Lauder at a ladies' lunch. With the tobacco-precedent in place, it will be a fight over whose right trumps the other's and it will leave an enduring, bitter legacy.
This is not really a question of rights, however. The nose has no rights; it has only opinions. People will smell, for better or worse, of what they wear, what they eat, what they drink and what they don't wash often enough.
That ultimately can't be regulated. Who would want to live in a country that would try? This country will try -- it is already trying -- and it will succeed unless people accept two things: First, that not everybody loves the smell of perfume in the morning, or in the elevator, or in the office or on the bus; and second, that the nose is only a personal place until it goes out in public, where it has to get to know other people View seven day for previous Winnipeg Free Press stories.
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