Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The tired hack, when confronted with a smoke-filled room, will reach for the cliché. One of the favourites is "blue haze", but the funny thing is that it's just perfect for some situations. Like last night in Munich's Löwenbräu Keller, where hundreds of Bavaria's smokers staged a beer hall rally to stave off the enacting of a law that will force them to stop lighting up in bars, restaurants and cafés.

In the run up to the gathering, the smokers plastered the city with posters decrying the coming "total smoking ban", but this is disingenuous. From 1 January, Bavarians will still have plenty of places in which to smoke. They'll just have to be more creative about discovering them. But they're not giving up without a fight, and in keeping with Dr Johnson's dictum that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", their leaders are playing the patriotic card. Bavaria's "culture" is in mortal danger from the smoking ban, they claim. The village inn will be forced to close, and rural society will fall apart.

Rubbish. Village inns and rural pubs are closing because the police are mercilessly enforcing the laws pertaining to driving under the influence of alcohol. Remote places are hard to access without private transport, but with more vehicles on the roads than ever and more inexperienced motorists behind the wheel, leniency for drunk driving is nonexistent. This is bad for landlords, but it's good for putative widows and orphans. As well, rural pubs and village inns are losing business because they are no longer the only game in the countryside.

Many of their customers are still involved in farming, but they have other outlets for their energies now. Long adept at evading tax and swindling the generous subsidies doled out by Brussels, today's rural dweller is very likely to possess an enviable stock of booze, a giant plasma TV screen and a comprehensive collection of pornographic DVDs. Why spend the evening in the gloomy local listening to Sepp or Seamus moaning about foreigners, when master and milk maid can cuddle up on the couch and enjoy an evening with Jenna Jameson (1,235,291 friends on MySpace!), while faithful Shep guards the manse and barks savagely when urban hypocrites dressed as faux peasants and preaching "tradition" approach?

Last night's pathetic show in the Löwenbräu Keller was the last gasp of those who refuse to accept that their pleasure is now taboo and is about to be replaced by new addictions such as weight loss, homeopathy, environmentalism, herbalism and Botox. Smoking was less dishonest than all of those, but it's history. Time to move on.