[URBAN NOTE] "Rob Ford’s insatiable appetite for destruction"

[rfmcdonald]

Nichols Köhler's extended MacLean's article has an interesting portrayal of the media representation of Rob Ford, as a man who straddles Toronto's public and private faces, forcing public recognition that Toronto isn't all world-class sweetness and light.

As much because of his gaffes as because of his no-nonsense, low-cost, customer-friendly take on municipal government—respect the taxpayers, return their calls—Torontonians of all sorts thrill to Rob Ford. Those who hate him see in him everything that is wrong with their city, from the out-of-control car culture to the rabid condo development to the city’s parochial and low-brow sensibility. Those who love him see themselves in his modest comforts and earthly desires. Ford holds a mirror to the conflicted heart of this city and asks Torontonians why they would ever want to be Manhattan when instead they could be the very best of The Simpsons’ Springfield and Shelbyville combined. Yet though he sold himself to Toronto as a simple man, clearly Ford is anything but—complex, even troubled, he seeks to honour the memory of his father, a provincial politician, but just as often falls short. In his latest scandal he has taken us into the dark place at the edge of the city, a forbidden realm, and transformed himself from a harmless Mayor Quimby figure into a character from a film by David Lynch. Mayor Ford’s most recent troubles find him straddling two Torontos—the wholesome place and the den of iniquity.

[. . .]

For Toronto readers there was something undeniably compelling about Cook’s Gawker account, written with the keen fresh eye of a non-resident. The Gawker story reads like vivid travel literature, a glimpse into the exotic soul of a Toronto many here don’t know or give much thought to, and which exists on the inner suburban fringes outside the downtown core. A vertigo similar to that which accompanied the gender-bending tale of NFL linebacker Manti Te’o, whose fake online girlfriend turned out to be a man, attends the Ford crack-cocaine allegations. But in Ford’s story it is the unusual collision of class, high and low, and race, white and black, that injects a taboo frisson into the mix, a Dickens novel of street drugs and F-bombs.

“Toronto is lovely,” Cook writes before detailing his time spent in the company of youths who “speak in a language other than English.” Cook doesn’t say it, but the Star story is more specific, and suggests that these men are active in the hardscrabble Dixon Road and Kipling Avenue area of west Toronto, a 10-minute drive northwest of Ford’s lushly situated Etobicoke home, and that the language Cook heard was likely Somali. Cook and the Star also published a photograph they said was supplied by these men of Ford posing with three apparent youths, one of whom appears to be Anthony Smith, a 21-year-old Seneca College student who died in March with two bullets in the back of his head. Ford, who is seen in the picture grinning like a rambunctious child—apparently more comfortable than Ford, who is unaccountably shy, ever looks at city hall or in the midst of a crowd of his supporters—reinforcing the impression he is travelling in an underworld. “Smith was, according to our tipster, a kid from the same neighbourhood as the dealers who service Ford, and the photo was taken while Ford was going to the neighbourhood to purchase and smoke crack cocaine,” Cook writes.

Here, then, is a portrait of a wealthy and powerful white man, the mayor of North America’s fourth-largest city and heir to Deco Labels and Tags, a successful business begun by his father, Doug, with his arm around a black youth who died in a gang-related shooting and who can be seen extending his middle finger to the camera. The photograph shocks in part because it depicts Ford, mayor of the surface Toronto of tall glass buildings and urban elites, travelling in a gangland netherworld, lost somewhere in the sprawl of Dixon and Kipling or of such inner Toronto suburbs as Rexdale, where much of the city’s drug crime is located. Not far away is Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School, where Ford coached the Eagles football team until this week, when the Toronto Catholic District School Board dismissed him from the position for saying during a recent television interview that his players would be dead or on drugs were it not for him.

The Gawker and Star accounts, which describe cellphone footage that three reporters say shows Ford inhaling from a glass pipe and uttering obscenities—Justin Trudeau is a “fag,” the football players he coached “just f–king minorities,” according to the Star story—link the mayor to crack cocaine, a drug with a low-rent mystique, the soma of the ghetto. That class marker goes back to the 1980s, when inexpensive crack cocaine fuelled an inner-city epidemic of crime across the U.S. that culminated in the arrest of Washington mayor Marion Barry. Since then it has morphed somewhat in the popular imagination into the vice of tabloid celebrities, of Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston. So improbable is crack’s use among white professionals, in this popular view of the drug—however misguided it may be—that the phenomenon has spawned an addiction-memoir sub-genre all its own, detailing the exploits of high-functioning or well-heeled users slumming it on the stuff (Bill Clegg, a New York literary agent, with Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, and New York Times columnist David Carr’s Night of the Gun, to name two).