Unintentional art on the Toronto subway

Eglinton West station, originally uploaded by johnfitzgerald.

Eglinton West station

Traffic cones

Traffic cones, originally uploaded by johnfitzgerald.

University Avenue, Toronto

University Avenue, Toronto, originally uploaded by johnfitzgerald.

Mt. Sinai Hospital

The Liquid Life

Well into the 1970s the government of Ontario strove to make getting a drink as difficult as possible. Licensed establishments were, to use an entirely appropriate cliche, few and far between. They were so far between that you could sober up walking from one to the next, which is perhaps why so many people drove drunk in those days.

I have lived along St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto for over 30 years. It is a heavily travelled street in a densely populated part of the city, a city which has a high residential density. Nevertheless, in the mid-1970s there were all of four taverns on St. Clair West in the mile and a quarter between Bathurst Street and Dufferin Street, with a beer hall round the corner on Dufferin. There were two lounges in the mile and a quarter between Yonge Street and Bathurst (both within two blocks of Yonge – people in Forest Hill didn’t drink, it seems). Furthermore, in the two and a half miles between Yonge and Dufferin there was one beer store and one liquor store.

There were in those days three types of drinking establishment in Ontario. Lounges were the poshest type of establishment. Since they were Ontarian that means they were posh mainly in comparison with the other types of drinking establishment. Anyway, they served all types of alcohol to people who could afford higher prices. Taverns also served all types of alcohol but the bulk of their receipts had to consist of food orders. The beer parlours were usually called hotels. For a long time the licensing regulations had restricted new drinking establishments to hotels, so all sorts of fleabag hotels sprang up with a dozen rooms or so and a gigantic beer parlour.

The beer parlours were intended for the lower orders, and in keeping with the traditional Ontario fear of those orders drinking in beer parlours was made as unpleasant as possible. For one thing, men on their own were not allowed to drink with women. God only knows what those lower-class hooligans would have got up to if that had been allowed, eh? Beer parlours were divided into two rooms, the ladies and escorts’ side and the men’s side. The ladies and escorts’ was usually pleasant enough, but the men’s side was usually appalling.

For a while in 1971 my local was the Chateau Dufferin (the aforementioned beer hall round the corner). The escorts’ there was a pleasant room with flocked wallpaper and subdued lights. The men’s side consisted of two rooms. The back room contained a long table around which a dozen or so men would sit glumly while they watched a black and white television on a shelf in the corner. The front room was bigger, full of the standard pedestal tables, each with a terrycloth slipcover on which sat a salt shaker and an ashtray. You sat down at one of the tables and a waiter with a tray of draught would appear. At the Chateau (no circumflex accent, of course) they used to wait for you to order a pair of draught. At many places they just put two in front of you without asking. The chief drawback of the Chateau’s front men’s room was its men’s room – when you went to the can it was a good idea to take your waders.

No one could drink outdoors. No one could drink indoors if someone outdoors could see them (most beer halls featured windows of glass block). No one could transport an open bottle of liquor or an open case of beer. Most restaurants were dry, and on Sundays you could only drink with a meal, so if you ran out of booze on Sunday you had to hunt around for one of the few licensed restaurants,

Such were the good old days. Government – and respectable opinion – considered a large segment of the population to be in need of paternalistic protection; its members could not be trusted to act responsibly. To control them, government established different standards of service for different social groups. Men got worse service than women, working people got worse service than the well-heeled.

These days there are more bars and licensed restaurants, and men on their own are actually considered to be others’ equals. The old hotels are almost extinct, and the survivors no longer enforce segregation. Blanket rules are being replaced with measures that address specific problems, such as spot checks of drivers.

Some of the blanket rules remain (where you can drink remains fairly restricted, although you can now drink outdoors where the public can see you), but life is altogether more open and egalitarian in Ontario these days. On the whole, people drink less abusively, too. A common way to pass a long weekend on the old days was to lay in a store of booze at home and spend the weekend drinking it. One of the reasons people don’t do that any more is probably that there are more things for people to do, but surely another is that drinking outside the house has been made much easier.

People still feel the need to drink, though. Drinkers are more responsible these days, but to me that is a worrisome development. Binge drinkers drink to enjoy themselves. Responsible drinkers drink for reasons that seem more sinister to me – relaxation, for example. Maybe we could start some research now on why people now need chemical help to relax. Me, I can relax at the drop of a hat.

The Liquid Life © John FitzGerald, 2008

Cherry & Commissioners 2

Cherry & Commissioners 2, originally uploaded by johnfitzgerald.

Requiem for the Information Age

Thirty years have passed since the Information Age ended, and we are at last in a position to understand why our naive faith in the utility of communications technology proved to be unfounded.

At the beginning of the Information Age, Thoreau famously observed that "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." The problem, as it turned out, was exactly the opposite: Maine and Texas had far too much of importance to communicate.

The apex of the Information Age was reached in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Informative news reports from Vietnam shook public confidence in the advisability and even the morality of American intervention there, and eventually the United States abandoned its South Vietnamese allies. Then in 1974 a flood of information about the involvement of Richard Nixon in organized crime led to his resignation.

The Information Age was turning out to be dangerous. Regardless of whether any individual American supported or did not support Richard Nixon or the armed intervention in Vietnam, he or she experienced a great deal of anguish as a result of the appearance of actual information in the realm of public discourse. The height of the Information Age was a period which scarred the psyche of the United States, and Americans could not have been expected to endure much more of the turmoil which information entailed without enormous harm being done to the Great Republic.

The credit for slaying the dragon of Information goes to Ronald Reagan. By arranging for the passage of legislation favourable to giant media conglomerates, he earned the gratitude of the press, which spent the rest of his two terms treating him as if he were a serious person. Thus the Information Age turned into the Marketing Age in which we now live.

The press quickly deteriorated into a vehicle for the promulgation of press releases. President Reagan's inflation of the national debt was ignored, his complicity in illegal arms deals glossed over, the questionable utility of his armed interventions abroad not even hinted at.

The media mastered their new craft in the Reagan era. Compare, for example, the Watergate scandal to the scandals which led to the impeachment of President Clinton, or the scandal involved in the approval of the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court.

Watergate unfolded despite the best efforts of President Nixon to stifle it. The news media were not to be diverted from their job, as they then saw it, of being media for news. By the time Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, though, the news media were no longer interested in news. They showed little interest in aspects of the Thomas affair which would have had Vietnam-era journalists drooling: the failure to hear testimony from the other women who had complained about Thomas's conduct, for example. They were content to take the Thomas hearings as the Republicans meant them to be taken: as a morality play. Justice Thomas was presented simply as the victim of unsubstantiated allegations, the crucial point being that little interest was shown in finding out whether the allegations could be substantiated. A few years later the media followed up on the scandal by printing allegations about Anita Hill which turned out to have been based on mistaken identity.

As George Edge, a contributor to the late website NEW IMPROVED HEAD, has pointed out, the press was effectively diverted by simple stratagems from pursuing serious questions about the actions of President Clinton. By appearing weak on the issue of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton distracted the attention of the press from more serious issues such as the possibility that his staff was used to pay blackmail. Again a simple morality play was staged, and the attention of the public was directed to simple moral issues which the members of the public could resolve to their own personal taste.

In general the Clinton presidency was a masterpiece of marketing. President Clinton failed, for example, to keep the most important promise he made in his first campaign, to reform public health care. He did, however, come up with a plan to reform public health care, one which was unnecessarily complex and completely impractical, and this plan was presented as if it were a major public policy initiative. President Clinton was very successful in presenting his failures as the result of sabotage by the Republicans. In fact the Republicans did often try to sabotage his plans, but that supposedly is what democracy is about. If you make it easy for your opponents to sabotage your initiatives, questions might be raised about your motives in doing so, but none were raised by the media, which by the 1990s were firmly established in a marketing orientation.

After Mr. Clinton, of course, we had the spectacle of George W. Bush being presented as a great President. Even in relative terms this assertion is difficult to support. In my lifetime alone the Presidents of the United States have included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, three men whose accomplishments dwarf any that George W. Bush could even think up to fantasize about as he drifts off to sleep.

President Bush Jr. understood marketing, though, or he knew someone who understood it. He quickly responded to the terrorist attacks by attributing them to a single demonic person whom he pledged to bring to justice, much as the stars of the World Wrestling Federation pledge to bring their enemies to justice. America seems to be no safer against terrorism now than it was on September 11, 2001 (President Bush even managed to lose a city in his second term), but the American people were united around their leader for a good part of his term.

Of course, these developments are not confined to the United States. The rest of the world, which never had as open a press as the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, could adopt the new approach even more easily than the American media. In the United Kingdom, for example, where the press was more interested in presenting Margaret Thatcher as a moral figure than as a political one (luckily for her, she thought she was a moral figure rather than a political one), the new role of the press as a vehicle for the simplified morality and sensation-mongering of the press release seemed a more natural development than it had in America.

And for all this we can be thankful. If the Information Age had not been done away with, it is doubtful if any American president would finish his term. Wars would be impossible to wage. The conduct of public affairs by our leaders would in effect cease.

For example, if President Johnson had decided to use military tribunals to try protesters against American actions in Vietnam, the press of the day would have gone for his throat. People would have been in the streets, even more riots would have taken place. President Bush's plans to use military tribunals could not elicit even a raised eyebrow from the media. Power is back where it belongs, in the hands of the powerful. Information no longer retains the power to destabilize the most powerful societies on earth, because information no longer exists.

Requiem for the Information Age © 2001, 2010, John FitzGerald

On gentility

[First published in 2008]

Perhaps there is a gene for gentility. No matter how hard we try, we always end up being admonished by prigs about how offensive we are. These days some of the prigs go to the trouble of murdering the offensive people.

We are thinking, of course, of the murderous rampages some Muslims went on following the publication of cartoons of their prophet. These rampages were justified as responses to the offence that the cartoons constituted. This position amounts to a claim that Muslims have the right to determine what cartoons should be published while non-Muslims do not.

Any standard of conduct is an attempt to expand the power of one group at the expense of another. Often the expansion of power is intended to benefit society as a whole. Polite prohibitions of coughing or sneezing without covering your mouth, or against spitting on the public footpaths, are ultimately intended to reduce the spread of disease by increasing the power of the healthy at the expense of the unhealthy. Laws against theft increase the power of the propertied and law-abiding at the expense of the thieving.

However, religious believers’ assertions that codes of conduct or of law should require that non-believers respect them do not produce benefits for society, but only for the believers who want respect. In the Western world the status of religious organizations as arbiters of mores is declining as the number of believers in their mythologies declines. Finding that their threats of eternal damnation have lost the power to persuade people, the religious try instead to appeal to worldly standards of gentility. Why, disagreeing with the Archbishop of Canterbury is too, too vulgar.

The religious, however, feel no obligation to refrain from offending the non-religious, or indeed from offending each other. That is why we can conclude that the real goal of their demands for respect is not conformity to standards of gentility but rather an attempt to shore up their collapsing social status.

Different from the demands of the religious are the demands of various underprivileged groups for respect. These differ in that they are rather reminders to us that they should have as much power as other groups do. While these demands are laudable in intent, they seem to us to have got the relationship the wrong way round.

People do not have power because they are respected, they are respected because they are powerful. To paraphrase Barbara Ehrenreich, legislators are quick to announce their respect for family values, but slower to announce legislation which will promote the formation and expansion of families. Professions of respect do not equal respect.

Of course, the powerful are happy to dish out the respect. These days people in positions of influence are punctilious about the names they give to other groups. In fact, they have managed to transform the struggle for equality into a struggle for polite terminology. They still call the less privileged late for dinner, but they care about what they call them.

In a democratic society, you will not promote important social change by appealing to standards of gentility. The fundamental idea of gentility is always that some people are better than others. Calling for others to respect you encourages them only to be polite. It does not encourage them to share their surplus power with you. For that you need to appeal to universal values, such as justice.

On Gentility ©John FitzGerald, 2008

The triumph of kitsch

Inept imitations of art are known as kitsch. As another article here notes, though, no one can define art in any aesthetically meaningful way, so defining kitsch as the inept imitation of art can’t be aesthetically meaningful, either.

Art and kitsch therefore become moral terms. Art comes to consist of objects and performances which conform to the arbitrary artistic standards of an individual or group, while kitsch consists of objects and performances which do not.

So one person might consider Martin Amis’s fiction to be art, while another might consider it an inept imitation of his father’s art, and therefore kitsch. Similarly one person might consider C. M. Collidge's portraits of dogs playing poker to be kitsch, while another may be unable to see any substantial difference between it and René Magritte's highly regarded representation of a steaming locomotive suspended in a fireplace.

The ambiguity of these and other moral ideas is, as usual, in large part a product of modern technology. Back in the days when there were few channels of communication, it was easy for one conception of art to become generally accepted – if you never heard of an alternative to it, you were more likely to agree with the conception you were allowed to hear about.

These days, though, channels of communication are virtually infinite, and acquaintance with the moral conceptions promoted by all of them utterly impossible. So people often fall back on their own fears as sources of their moral ideas. People who fear their own violent impulses compensate by attributing them to others who, they claim, abuse animals. People who fear their own unusual sexual impulses become crusaders for family values. People who invade Iraq for no particularly good reason and kill thousands of Iraqis stand firm against abortion. And for not coveting thy neighbour’s goods.

The religious often argue that unbelief provides no grounds for morality, while religion does. However, this argument only holds if no alternative to religious morality is allowed to be discussed. The belief that there is no heaven – such as the Christian heaven, into which believers think they can worm their way by not having the courage to stand up to the cosmic bully who threatens to blast them to hell if they don’t do his will – has profound moral implications, but if you don’t let people think about them, then they can’t base a morality on them.

Art is morality, and morality art. We cannot acquire the knowledge necessary to provide a foundation for an objective moral code. In particular, we can never know exactly what behaviours human beings are capable of developing, and if we do not know that we cannot prescribe particular behaviours and condemn others. After millennia of being instructed not to steal, for example, our fingers are still remarkably light, especially since millions of us still believe that stealing from someone richer than we are is admirable on our part and salutary for the richer people. Perhaps theft isn’t a sign of evil so much as it is a sign of an incorrigible inability to connect beliefs about abstract ideas with beliefs about specific opportunities which present themselves to us.

In morality, as in art, kitsch has effectively triumphed. In the absence of objective standards, any standard goes. You send money to Save the Vegetables, I send money to Protect Our Peonies, and we are both moral beings. We feel pretty moral, at least. As Milan Kundera has observed, the kitsch consists not only of admiring something, but also of admiring yourself for admiring it. And if you and I should ever meet in, say, business, one or the other of us may feel so moral as to feel justified in screwing the other demonic vegetable/peony-hating prick. The law, of course, may catch up to us if we try anything funny, but, as we know, law is the creation not of real people but of two classes of demon – politicians and lawyers.

We don’t know much about morality, but we know what we like. And that is the morality of kitsch.

The Triumph of Kitsch © John FitzGerald, 2007

Lights

Lights, originally uploaded by johnfitzgerald.

Bloor West

Are you Canadian?

You may be Canadian if:

• you think there should be a maximum prize in the lottery so that more people can share the wealth.
  

• you'd really like to do something to make Quebeckers feel more at home in Canada, as long as it doesn't involve learning French.
  

• you're proud that the best thing in your country in any category is among the ten best things in that category in North America.
  

• you hate Americans but get upset whenever a new Canadian channel bumps an American one off the cable.
  

• you hate Brian Mulroney, even if you voted for him both times.
  

• you know what an in-turn draw is.
  

• you think Toronto is a big city.
  

• you hate Americans, even though most of your relatives are Americans.
  

• you don't think Wayne Gretzky was the greatest hockey player ever.
  

• you own a Tom Connors record or CD.
  

• you hate Americans, but worry that the high dollar will keep them from visiting your town.
  

• you don't understand why they don't have Robertson screwdrivers anywhere else. [and why don't they, eh? – ed.]
  

• you know where you were when Paul Henderson scored The Goal.
  

• you hate Americans, but vacation in Florida.
  

• you still think the Rogers Centre was a good idea.
  

• you've never held a handgun.
  

• you hate Americans, but glow with pride whenever one of them mentions Canada on television.

Are You Canadian © John FitzGerald, 2008

Sunday in Toronto

6938, originally uploaded by johnfitzgerald.

York Club

One way of dealing with an overexposed photograph. Click on the photo for more information.

The language of love

Ah, the French! Connoisseurs of food, of wine, and, of course, of love. Those of us who live in British cultures live in societies deprived of love. What with all the time we must devote to getting and spending, we simply don’t have time for as childish and as…French a sentiment as love!

To understand the joy of love, to understand its wondrous benefits and, above all, its essence, we must turn to the French. Here is a collection of inspiring thoughts about love from the great minds of French culture.

• Love is a simple thing, a desire followed by a brief act, and there you have it reduced to its exact proportions; all the rest is literature. (Maurice Donnay)
  
• Love, as it exists in society, is merely the exchange of two fantasies, and the contact of two skins. (Nicolas Chamfort)
  
• In love one begins with rhetoric and finishes with philosophy. (Jacques Dyssord)
  
• If we judge love by its effects, it resembles hate more than friendship. (La Rochefoucauld)
  
• Love, like everything else which lives, begins to degenerate as soon as it is conceived. (Jean Rostand)
  
• Love is like those hotels where all the luxury is in the lobby. (Paul-Jean Toulet)
  
• Love is a punishment for not being able to keep to ourselves. (Marguerite Yourcenar)
  
• Love is the only passion which is paid for with a currency which it manufactures itself. (Stendhal)
  
• In love it is easier to abandon a sentiment than a custom. (Proust)
  
• The love which one hails as the source of our pleasures is at most only a pretext for them. (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos)
  
• In love, the only victory is retreat. (Napoléon Bonaparte)
  
• What is annoying about love is that it is a crime in which you must have an accomplice. (Baudelaire)
  
• The most beautiful moment of love comes when you climb the stairs. (Georges Clemenceau)

Ah, the French!

The Language of Love ©
John FitzGerald, 2007