Andrew Coyne: Rob Ford doesn’t need to hear ‘get help.’ He needs to hear ‘get out’ Andrew Coyne Monday, Nov. 18, 2013 Something snapped at Toronto City Council Monday afternoon, and it wasn’t just Rob Ford’s cerebral cortex. Watching the mayor and his brother strutting about the council chamber — ignoring the Speaker, taunting other councillors, shouting down city officials, screaming insults at spectators, the whole carried out with an air of anarchic glee — was to sense the last tether connecting our politics to some sort of civilized norms breaking under the strain. We are adrift now, floating wildly, with no idea of where we will end up. At one point the mayor engaged in an extended pantomime of a drunk driver, directed at a councillor who had been cautioned by police. At another, racing about the chamber — literally sprinting — he ploughed into another councillor, knocking her to the floor, apparently in his haste to join the apprehended brawl then under way between his brother and members of the public gallery. To add to the general note of menace, the mayor was seen directing his personal driver/security guard, who for some reason was allowed onto the chamber floor, to videotape certain of the spectators who had displeased him. Given the services his last driver, the alleged extortionist Sandro Lisi, is accused of performing, it was an altogether chilling moment. If it is unclear where we are headed, it is clear as day how we got here. With each passing day, the Fords have been dragging the standards we expect of public officials deeper and deeper into the muck, each past act of public or private depravity somehow normalized by the next, worse offence. It is as if, knowing the evidence cannot exonerate the mayor, they and their apologists have decided to annihilate our very ability to judge the evidence. Over the past couple of weeks, since it was at last confirmed that, contrary to months of stonewalling and evasions if not outright denials, the mayor was indeed caught on that infamous cellphone video — and his still more belated admission that he has smoked crack — the public’s collective moral judgment has been assailed by every sly wheedle, every manipulative tactic, every deliberate lie the two could come up with. We have seen, by turns, the remorseless apology (“All I can do is apologize and move on”), the bargaining for time (“I have nothing left to hide”), the pseudo-legal clam-up (“I can’t say anything, it’s before the courts”), the non-denial denial (“I do not smoke crack; I am not an addict”), the Clintonian verb-parsing (“you didn’t ask me the right question”), the claim of diminished responsibility (“in one of my drunken stupors”), the appeal to impossible standards (“I’m not a perfect person”), the appeal to no standards (“everybody does it”), the invocation of class envy (“all these rich and elitist people … they’re the biggest crooks around”), the plea for sympathy (“this is the second-worst day of my life, after the day my father died”), the declaration of pure, all-devouring solipsism (“I love this job”). And that’s just a partial list. The Fords have picked fights, dodged blame, sprayed accusations, and issued threats (“If you wanna get nasty we can get nasty,” the mayor told an interviewer, “I can start digging up dirt on every single one of those politicians…”). The Fords have even demanded that every member of council undergo a drug test, as if that, and not the mayor’s documented, multiple misdeeds were the issue. Throughout, they have tugged on all those sentiments that often cloud the public’s ability to form inferences in such cases — judge not, who am I to judge, don’t rush to judge, anything but the very thing we are called to do as citizens with regard to those we elect: judge. Even in the midst of Monday’s mayhem, his apologists were holding him to the standard of a Friday night beer league goon: “He was provoked.” More culpable still has been the unwillingness of political leaders, notably his federal Conservative allies, to denounce Ford in the terms he deserves. The provincial Tory leader, Tim Hudak, deserves credit for pledging his support for provincial intervention, should that prove necessary. But the Liberal premier has said she will not without an invitation from the council, and the council seems disinclined to issue such an invitation. The rest of us are, in a sense, handcuffed. We simply don’t know how to respond to this level of misconduct, this sort of contempt for social norms. At some level, our whole system depends upon people, however badly they may behave, staying within some sort of limits. But the Fords have demonstrated they are under no such constraint. All of which should make abundantly clear that it is time to put aside the therapeutic language, the Oprah-like pleas to the mayor to “get help” or “seek treatment.” We are long past that point. The mayor’s actions Monday were quite deliberate. They reflected the influence, not of intoxicants, but his own limitless ego and unformed character. As such it is not Ford who has the problem; it’s the city. The message he needs to hear, from every corner, is not get help, but get out. National Post nationalpost/m/wp/blog.html?b=fullcomment.nationalpost/2013/11/18/andrew-coyne-rob-ford-doesnt-need-to-hear-get-help-he-needs-to-hear-get-out
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 05:21:15 +0000
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