Just Give Me 5.10.15 Minutes
of Your Hate: Parsing Rob Ford’s Rage
I only watched it once and I don’t need to see it again;
it’s gross and pathetic, but it’s what 1/3 of Canadians will vote for and
support, come hell or high water.
*That,* not Rob Ford, is what is sad.
Hand him a microphone, and Don Cherry, that erstwhile bare-knuckles
moralist, will still support a train wreck as the leader of Canada’s
largest city. Would Don Cherry
support Rob Ford as his team captain with the Springfield Indians? Probably not.
But as Mayor of his city, you bet, because Rob, flushed though he never
not is, it at least not a “pinko.” Even
if he didn’t “make the trains run on time,” even if he didn’t fulfill his
promises, Rob is still the guy who *says* he’ll make the trains run on time,
and that’s enough for 1/3 of Canadian voters.
You just have to say. You don’t
have to do. You preach “accountability,”
but then you use Canada’s
largest city’s City Hall as a man-cave, and somehow that’s not “entitlement.” Just what do Conservatives mean when they use
words like “accountability” and “entitlement”?
?? What do they mean?
Anyway, as for the video.
Well, my title, above, is probably misleading. Sorry.
Who can parse, or should bother parsing, a drunken rant? But I don’t know; one ought always to try to
interpret and figure things out. What struck me was, IIRC, that Ford said first
that he needed 10 minutes to kill a guy and rip his throat out and gouge out
his eyes and so on. . .and then 5. . .but then also 15, I think. Now, when you’re seriously, seriously drunk,
all points narrow to a miniscule place in front of your feet (years since Rob
saw his, but whatever). With the bravado
of a drunkard who knows he’s got whiskey bravery, Ford assures his audience
that he is not one to be messed with, even when messed up. He is, despite the handful of neurons he’s
got left firing, pretty focused—pretty focused, in his own mind, on those who might
call him down. He lets people know, on
no uncertain terms, that he will—and can—mess up anyone up who messes with him
and his family. But then, in the
intensity of his rage/mock bravado, etc., he can’t seem to fix on a
timeline. First it’s 10 minutes, then
it’s 5, then it’s 15, etc. Even a
drunken drunk can often fixate on just one thing; indeed, sometimes just one
thing is all a drunken drunk can
fixate on. But Rob Ford can’t even seem
to do this. He can’t get his story
straight even when he’s reduced to miniscule capacity on the one subject that
is what is animating what is left of his mental functioning. Rob Ford might be a good motivator as a
football coach—who knows? But I’d hate
for him to be drawing up plays in the red zone when we’re down by 6 with no
time left on the clock. He can’t even
figure out how long it would take him to kill someone.
As a former longtime Torontonian, I feel for Toronto. I don’t think anyone can actually love Toronto, possibly not anyone even born there (and imagine
all the changes Toronto
has absorbed, whether you’ve lived there 5 or 75 years!! How many other cities, anywhere, have changed
as much, as successfully, as Toronto?), but Toronto can earn one’s
grudging respect. I hope both of you who
might read this really get what I’m saying; Toronto really isn’t about you. Toronto
is about a big city that slowly, slowly makes you feel like an individual. You can’t say that about many other
capitals—try it in Rome or Sydney
or Paris or Stockholm or whatever—just try it. In its way, Toronto is one of the great cities. And it’s sad to see it in the world press
because of Ford, a suburban fatman offered the keys to a massive economic and
cultural sector. I’m astonished that it
even has made the news. It’s well-nigh
impossible for Canada to make the world news anywhere, for any reason, but
Harper on the environment and foreign policy and Ford with his crack seem to be
doing yeoman service in that regard.
Politicians behave badly everywhere, but maybe the reason the world
press has become so fixated on what Harper and Ford are doing is precisely
because what they are doing are things that they—those presses and
countries—had just never expected of Canada—destroying the environment, being a
total outlier on small-arms treaties, joining basically no-one on automatic
support for Israel while other countries are at least contemplative and hopeful
of dialogue, closing embassies and shutting off contact, smoking crack as the
leading civic official of the biggest city, and so on. It’s like finding out your uncle was (pick
your notorious criminal), but not only is loud and proud about it, he’s only
momentarily repentant and keen and sure to be re-elected.
Canada
needs a moral reset. I can sort of
understand how we’ve come to this pass (another subject), but it sure better be
an interregnum, and I hope Canadians of generations succeeding mine will restore
Canada’s
moral compass.
I always tried to sway European friends away from the
automatic allure of cities like Los Angeles (I’ve been there, and it ain’t no
tv and the angels walk by night), but now Canada isn’t looking at all like the
really basically cosmopolitan or otherwise down-to-earth place that it kind of
is; instead, it just looks like some vicious redneck backwater. My guess is that is why Canada is at last
getting some world attention—because it is looking just as tawdry and corrupt
and venally self-interested as other countries it used to hold itself above.
There’s a lot I don’t like about the Ford coverage—the chequebook
journalism, or at least the creep of it, the going to a guy’s house as he’s
leaving for work—I don’t support that.
But with his sense of entitlement, his refusal to be accountable, and
the company he keeps (from countless lowlifes and criminals to Jim Flaherty and
Prime Minister Stephen Harper), Ford has brought it on himself. I’m tired and weary of people who say he
should “take a couple weeks off” or “get help.”
Rob Ford invited cameras to see him “get help” for his soda pop
addiction and take off some pounds—how did that work? And when the Fords “get help,” you kinda just
generally don’t want to know those people.
When Dougie and Robbie and their Dad “get help,” they tend not to be
speaking of nannies. Rob Ford thinks he
can make his problems go away if he just says “I’m sorry,” and sadly, he’s
probably right. But all those who say
“he should just take a leave of absence” are just as morally supine. It is comical to think that Rob Ford can just
take a couple weeks off or “get treatment” and rebound as a changed man, as one
who has changed the entire lineage of his entitled, bullying, criminal
family. If a mob don went into rehab for
a couple months, would you hire him as your butler?
No, the people who voted and will keep voting for Rob Ford
need a reset. We must stop admiring not
just flawed people, but flawed people who boast of killing people. Because eventually, one way or another, those
people do end up implicated in the
killing of others. (How often have you stumbled around a dining room, drunk or
not, ranting about killing someone in graphic terms? Again, don’t answer that, for I guess I just
don’t know how the world has changed.) We
have to stop admiring and voting for people who are clearly involved in
criminal underworlds just because it suits our ideologies. Other countries have clawed their ways out of
such mentalities; we seem to be clawing our way in.
Rob Ford is a sad, sad case (and who isn’t, at one time or
another—I’m not setting myself above him, except that I don’t share his
fondness for criminals and lowlifes and drugs and far-right entitled cronies,
etc.). I’d like to like the guy; I would
have a beer and talk football or hockey with him. But in his progressive involvement in crime,
and through his sense of entitlement inherited through his bullying family, he
has brought problems upon himself.
Clearly, it came from his parents and his father. You don’t get to be Rob Ford without some
pretty stern tutelage. Now he and his
family have brought shame on his city and his country. Such is his sense of entitlement and lack of
accountability, though, that he and his buddies like Don Cherry and Jim
Flaherty and Stephen Harper think that they can just “move on.”
Maybe the worst thing that ever happened to Toronto was the GTA. That gave us adulterer Mel Lastman not
wanting to go to Africa for fear he’d be boiled in a pot (you’d think a guy
like Mel would know something about stereotyping and its darker outcomes),
calling in the military for a snowstorm, etc.
People who live in the GTA need a reset.
They need to start thinking of themselves as citizens of what is at
least potentially really one of the world’s great cities, and not as people
whose windows on the world are two-car garages.
Enough.
--zr
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