Above is one of the few authentic photographs of Robert Johnson, the great blues artist. Having allegedly made a bargain with the Devil to acquire his almost supernatural musical gift he was probably not too worried about the health effects of smoking, but others are worrying on his behalf -- and yours. A U. S. postage stamp made from the photograph removed the cigarette from his mouth.
Robert Johnson paid for this photobooth portrait, and this was how he chose to present himself before the camera's eternal gaze, with the haunted eyes and the spidery fingers on the frets of his guitar and the cigarette dangling from his lips. I wonder if the bureaucrats who decided to alter his image of himself ever really listened to his music -- ever realized that the hellhounds on Robert Johnson's trail were also on theirs.
Below is a link to a Boing Boing post about the removal of cigarettes from historical images of literary and pop culture figures:
The Cigarette Police
As a kid I remember being horrified to learn that the Soviet government would rewrite the "factual" content of encyclopedias to reflect the current political climate. Now Western governments and corporate entities (like there's a difference between the two) are tidying up history to reflect current policies of social hygiene.
You may see a big difference between these two forms of historical revisionism but the phenomena are intimately related in principal -- both involve large state and corporate interests appropriating history and changing it at will. They are, in other words, staking a claim to the ownership of history, and by extension reality.