Mayor Rob Ford: Wake me when it’s over!

It’s municipal election season in Toronto and, as usual, the boss is out of the office a lot. One thing that’s different this time is that the office phone is ringing off the hook. The callers are asking me what we’re going to do about Rob Ford. Sorry folks. I’m just an unpaid intern trying to run a threadbare, understaffed publishing operation here. The Rob Ford nightmare can and will happen if you let it.The choice is up to you. It’s time to start thinking seriously about the morning after—something John McCain should have done before he turned his campaign and party over to Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin (see Zina Saunders above). Now, thanks to McCain and Rupert Murdoch, a big fat Ford-like idiot is in charge of the Republican Party in the Great Republic. Our old friend Heather Mallick has the best and scariest column about waking up with Ford as mayor in her Star column today:

The angry, pink-faced man with the oversized head is our mayor. We, Toronto, gave him his landslide.

Voting for Ford is like sleeping with someone to get revenge on your spouse. It seems like a good idea at closing time, which is what an election is. Last call, and you neck down your last shot of good cold vodka. “Sure, whatever,” is what you say to everything said to you. “I hate streetcars too!” And you leave the lounge of the Empire Hotel on the arm of some big guy.

It is Oct. 26, the day after the election, and you wake in a hard, unfamiliar bed. Your eyeballs are congealed chip fat and your contact lenses have gone crispy. Your liver is en route somewhere. You appear to be missing a tooth. And there's something in bed next to you. It is the sweaty, beer-smelling oik from the bar last night.

Of course, you'll say what you always say, “As God is my witness, I will never ever do this again.”

To take up where Heather leaves off, people have been making this same mistake over and over and over and over again. The mistakes have names like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mike Harris, Ralph Klein, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Tim Hudak, etc. They’ve all happened in our lifetime. Something strange happens to the familiar political metastory of orderly progress and making the world a better place. A progressive leader of good will starts acting like a conservative or a doofus (Jimmy Carter tells American to drive smaller cars and turn down the thermostat; Bob Rae, the friend of ordinary Ontarians, rolls back signed collective agreements; Bill Clinton discusses education policy and Walt Whitman and then fools around with the dumbest intern in the office and blames it on a vast right-wing conspiracy; David Miller turns his back on organized labour and fights the longest public service strike in Toronto history and then turns his city over to the Harpoplicans to put on an Empire-Strikes-Back event; and all the while in the background President Hope seems to have nothing quite as important to do as carry out the craziest mission Dick Cheney ever dreamed up). And then there’s silence, as if they are ashamed of what they did or didn’t want to do it and don’t want to talk about it. Nothing computes.
The people are confused and turn on the TV looking for an answer and see an angry fat man, or an angry pseudo-cowboy, or an angry pseudo-governor from Alaska, or an angry has-been actor. They vent frustration and attack out-of-touch elites. They all look like the kind of folks you’d like to have a beer with. They decide, in this case, that a lardass with substance abuse and anger management problems who feels their frustration is just the answer they’ve been looking for. Presto Mayor Ford. Zizek has a pretty good essay on the larger world process in Living in the End Times See our earlier post on the book here. The process is as predictable as a roadrunner cartoon and has been happening for as long as we’ve had democratic politics here on planet earth. After the fancy pants American Whigs got drubbed by the unlettered backwoods bumpkin, Andrew Jackson, they never again nominated a presidential candidate who was not born in the backwoods, even if they had to send out an emergency crew to build the log cabin he was born in. The “answer” will always be a privileged plutocrat dressed up as a man of the people. Get over the surprise and ignore the “irony” that the media is currently serving up on Ford. It’s an old and familiar story.
And call the boss. He’s out there working for a candidate who is single-handedly trying to stem the Ford tide here in Ward 31. He and his friends need your help. The tide can be turned. David Miller was in third place at this point in 2003.