Just Give Me 5.10.15 Minutes of Your Hate: Parsing Rob Ford’s Rage

Just Give Me 5.10.15 Minutes of Your Hate: Parsing Rob Ford’s Rage

 

Yeah, I don’t know, I thought of one of Ruth Brown’s signature R&B songs (“5.10.15 Hours of Your Love”) when I watched Rob Ford’s drunken rant video (http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/11/07/mayor_rob_ford_caught_in_video_rant.html).

 

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