The Right Thing to Call Rob Ford

Try googling Toronto Mayoral candidate Rob Ford* and one of the first things that comes up is a short clip entitled “Councillor Rob Ford in action.” Taken from a 2005 documentary film called “Hogtown: The Politics of Policing," directed by Min Sook Lee, the film shows a nonplussed Rob Ford standing off to one side at first while another councillor, Case Ootes, attempts to correct the misinformation that Ford has manipulatively spread to reporters. When Rob Ford himself joins the press scrum, he is shrill and defensive and flustered, but the real excitement comes when, after he attempts to shout down Globe and Mail reporter John Barber who is asking for a clarification about his inconsistent remarks, a member of Rob Ford’s entourage accuses Barber of calling Rob Ford a “fat fuck.” There follows a name-calling chase by Rob Ford of Barber, the like of which I haven’t seen since the schoolyard at recess when I was in grade five. It offers, I suppose, a glimpse of the fine, dignified mayoral style that we can expect from Rob Ford in office. Here’s the video:



Now, if Barber did call Rob Ford a “fat fuck,” it is not audible in the video. But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that he did; the question, then, is why Rob Ford is so insistently demanding that Barber explain the label.

I think we can assume right off the bat that there can be no objection to the “fat” part of the label, which, while a tad bluntly expressed, is not exactly a surprising assessment. Indeed, when I have been even a little more overweight than I am now, I have readily used the adjective of myself, and I have many friends who would not hesitate to self-apply the label, who are not nearly as overweight as Rob Ford is. After all, facts are facts, and as Orson Welles so memorably and honestly put it, “gluttony is not a secret vice.” So we can assume that Rob Ford knows full well that he is indeed fat and that he accepts that other people know it as well.

So the trouble must be with the word “fuck.”

Now here, I am inclined to agree with Rob Ford’s indignation, and to wonder why Barber chose such a word. After all, “fuck” has to be the very last word or image I would want to associate even fleetingly with someone so vile as Rob Ford is. So we must assume therefore that Ford is indignant because he wishes to be known by another noun. And what might that be? Well, as the record shows, he's worked very hard for some time to earn a number of other labels. for starters, how about:

Rob Ford the unregenerate bigot?

Rob Ford the bald-faced liar?

Rob Ford the selfish, insensitive bastard?

Rob Ford the homophobic jerk?

Rob Ford the casually homicidal and fascist automobile owner?

Rob Ford the drunken lout?

Rob Ford the would-be wife-beater?

Rob Ford the law-obstructing criminal?

But come to think of it, there’s the point in Barber's favour: the list is such a long one. There are so many legitimate labels to choose from where Rob Ford is concerned, that one can hardly blame an overwhelmed and bullied columnist for opting to go with the time-honoured journalistic vice of the alliterative phrase.

At any rate, I remain puzzled by one thing: who, just exactly, is intending to vote for this pathetic, shrill and stupid little brute?

*(As I understand it, the more times a name, such as Rob Ford, is mentioned on a webpage, the higher it will appear in the search results when “Rob Ford” is entered.)

Richard Dawkins and "The God Delusion"

A friend of mine recently posted this video on his Facebook page, and I commented on it there. But because what I said returns to a thought I've had recurringly, I decided I would also record the thought here.

I am nagged by the feeling that Richard Dawkins, in his argument in favour of atheism, just makes things far too easy on himself. As Northrop Frye (in my view, a much more impressive thinker than Dawkins) once said (I paraphrase): "The problem with the question 'Do you believe in God' is that what people really mean is 'Do you believe in what I mean by the word God'." And Dawkins takes a very literalistic and naive and therefore very stupid idea of God ---an old guy in the clouds struggles with a snake in a garden and intervenes omnipotently but, 'for reasons unknown,' capriciously in human affairs--- and then shows just how stupid it is. Well...duh. Yes, that sort of thinking is superstition, and those people who stand by it are probably stupid. But what Dawkins wants, really, is to say just how stupid ALL believers are (you notice how he won't let go of that). Any idea more nuanced than the one he has just crushed is, in his view, "nebulous," and therefore he is still by far the cleverest man about.

But consider this: would it not be rather stupidly literalistic to say, for example, that Hamlet did not exist? A sophisticated thinker would be able to offer a dozen different ways in which Hamlet certainly exists, along with a few in which he didn't, and we'd get on with the discussion. If someone said we were being nebulous, we would say they were full of shit. Well, whatever else may be said of God, he is at least that, a character in a book---in fact, many books and many works of art; so it must be at least as stupid to say flatly that "God does not exist" as it would be to say that "Hamlet does not exist." Or, to look at it another way, there are adolescents who think they are very clever when they declare that "objectivity" or "truth" or "justice" or "love" or "mercy" or "honour" don't exist; and they don't, if you have no capacity for abstraction, and that's why intelligent adults seldom say such things. And again, one might say at least as much for the concept "God." Therefore, it is not really a discussion of existence, but of attributes; and this is where we can learn something from the sophisticated thinking of Northrop Frye, or Martin Buber or Charles Taylor or other modern, quite brilliant, believers.

In short, I just don't think that there can be any intelligent discussion of anything, religion included, without a little humility in play, and Dawkins, with his smug, one-dimensional, seven stage model of belief, comes precariously close to showing none.

Prisons and Higher Education

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Conservative Party of Canada intends to increase spending on our prisons ⎯ by way of creating more spaces, which is to say, imprisoning a higher proportion of our population ⎯ by 43%. This decision comes at a time at which they are insisting that our primary responsibility must be to cut back on government expenses and rein in the huge deficit: the budget is shrinking. So, when considered as a proportion of the latest overall budget, the increase in prison spending is even higher.

Naturally, if the circumstances were such that we desperately needed an increase of prison space to answer a corresponding increase in crime, this would be a very sensible and responsible manner of doing the nation’s business. But the true circumstances are far from this state of affairs. In fact, according to Statistics Canada Reports made available by the John Howard Society, the rates of crime in our country are lower now than they have been in decades.

Now, why is this the case? Well, there are many reasons, of course: improved methods of prevention, improved methods of detection, and ⎯ this is the one that the Conservatives and their supporters are reluctant to hear ⎯ less recidivism due to more enlightened concepts about the sentencing and supervision of felons.

The point about this last aspect of our judicial system is that is was set up in response to the recognition of a recurring phenomenon: patterns of recidivism demonstrated that our prisons were turning out people who were more committed to criminality than when they had gone in. It's actually a remarkably obvious point: spending extended amounts of time in company of people who have become career criminals ⎯ which most of the longest serving felons are ⎯ is more likely to inculcate a more sophisticated approach to criminality than to develop a determination to avoid crime.

In short, prisons tend to function as institutes of higher education in criminal techiques. Longer sentences are not harsher deterrents so much as they are like higher degrees: study longer and learn more.

By contrast, parole programs aimed more at the integration of convicts back into mainstream life based on their legitimately marketable skills are more likely to encourage a non-criminal existence. That’s also a pretty simple idea with which it would be difficult to argue directly.

However, as Stephen Harper has demonstrated, you can argue with it INdirectly, if you concentrate on anecdotes instead of statistics, and if you appeal to the fear of middle class property owners while ridiculing any opposing views as “soft on crime.”

Why would a person do such an irresponsible thing? Well, it probably doesn't seem irresponsible to them, because despite any evidence to the contrary, they feel deeply in their hearts that treating criminals more harshly MUST decrease crime, and they are so convinced that they are right about this that they have become incapable of considering any other point of view. Imagine that you have in your head an ideological conviction which plays a sort of brass-band marching tune that repeats endlessly, “Tough on Crime! Tough on Crime! Tough on Crime!” Well, then, you’d be deafened to reason, wouldn’t you? Demagoguery would be the inevitable consequence.

St Patrick's Day

Conversation overheard in the line-up at Tim Horton's between two international grad students, a Muslim woman from North Africa dressed in hijab, who was clearly a very recent arrival to Canada, and a Eastern European Jewish man wearing a yarmulke, who evidently had been here a little longer. Both are baffled, but determinedly polite.

She: "Can you please explain what is this day, this Saint Patrick's Day?"
He: "He is Irish saint. Very important saint for Irish church."
She: "So it is a Christian holy day?"
He: "Ummmm....This is not so easy to say..."

St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival

I'm just about to start rehearsals for another season at the St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival, in Prescott, Ontario (this year, the plays are Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew) and this seemed like a good time to reminisce over the last three seasons.

Wynton Marsalis on the Arts

Rick Mercer on Parliamentary Process

I wonder: is there anybody making a more positive contribution to the general mental health of Canadian parliamentary democracy than Rick Mercer?

In North American culture, and in the USA especially, so many comedians attempting political humour tend to take the lowest possible road, making snide comments about personal aspects of politicians that have already elicited abundant sneering: e.g., Bill Clinton and the ridiculously protracted scandal over oral sex; Jean Chretien and his mangled syntax. Now, if these vulnerabilities had more than a merely tangential relation to their jobs, the mockery would provide a salutary correction. But improving the political culture is not the motivation lying behind these sorts of jokes. Instead, the low-brow commentary stands in for more difficult political commentary. It succeeds only because it is an easy, cynical way of flattering the audience: "We all know this about politician X; now let's have a good, comfortable, complacent laugh about the matter."

Well, that's exactly what Rick Mercer tends to avoid. I can't think of anybody who has made me laugh more often, with more sense of joy, than Mercer. But he clearly disdains mean-spirited laughter; and, even then, he is not invariably aiming for the loudest or easiest laughter. Sometimes, in fact, he is not necessarily going for laughter at all. With his rants, for example, he can sometimes tap into a vein of outrage that is very funny; but at other times, he is too level and earnest to elicit much laughter. And in the case of this particular rant, he is certainly not flattering his audience. He is making a criticism about our political culture; and the criticism is, quite justly, directed at us.