Yesterday, a fellow student told me that he has a friend that went to school with Rob Ford. And that this friend told him that Rob Ford and his brother Doug (another too important politician) were the school's drug dealers. First, I didn’t believe. Having read more about Rob Ford in different newspapers, meanwhile I believe the story is true…
We dicussed with our teacher if Rob Ford behaves like a bull in a china shop or rather like a elephant ("maybe this is an insult against elephants"). In the evening we've been sitting in a bar, discussing the best jokes of Kirk's twitter account "Ron Ford". Yes, Rob Ford is a topic.
Having finally admitted that he smoked crack, Ford is entering the world news stage. His crack story was the second most popular story on the BBC website yesterday. Web.de, my German e-mail-provider, titled “Crack-Bürgermeister noch immer im Amt”. You prefer to read the story in Dutch? No problem.
In his kind-of-an-excuse-statement, Rob Ford said “I love this city, I love to be your mayor, I love to save taxpayers’ money”.
I can understand that he loves this city. But WHY THE HELL do so many Torontonians still love this mayor? I don’t get it. He is still the hero of many suburban car drivers and crack dealers.
And what does it have to do with “saving taxpayer’s money”, if you just don’t invest in the infrastructure your city urgently needs? Or, on the other hand, if you spend $2.8 billion for a senseless subway through a low-density area just because the most people in this area voted for you?
The Now Magazine, in its article “Mayor Rob Ford: He’s a lying, crack-smoking, public drunkard… and he’s running for re-election in 2014” expresses my opinion best: “Love the city? Then leave, Mayor Ford. (…) let us get back to being a world-class city. … Subways, subways, subways? No, Rob Ford: resign, resign, resign.”
Is there anything positive about having Rob Ford as a mayor?
Well, the world talks about your city. Bad press is better than no press, isn’t it?
Maybe in this case it would be better not to have the attention of the whole world…
You can perhaps argue that Rob Ford leads Toronto to a kind of grassroots democracy, where citizens are doing what they think is the best, because they can’t trust their mayor anyway. Take the bicycle example: Rob Ford hates cyclists (“roads are built for buses, cars and trucks, not for people on bikes”). Talking about "Accelerating the Adoption of Cycling for Transportation in Toronto”, Beth Savan showed yesterday a surprising result of her research: the share of cyclists amongst all commuters in Toronto has – similar to other North American cities – roughly doubled during the last 5 years, although the cycling infrastructure – contrary to other North American cities – hasn’t become much better, in fact some cycle lanes even disappeared. But the people just don’t care about the mayor and his weird politics, they cycle anyway. That's democracy, somehow.
Isn’t Rob Ford a perfect symbol for the American way of life? Where everybody – literally everybody – can became rich and famous?
Doesn’t the example of Rob Ford give hope to disappointed parents? “Yes, Kevin, you are small, fat, ugly, you’re a drug dealer, you’re an alcohol addicted – but hey, you can still become mayor of Toronto!”
Or what about an advertising sentence, that could attract the anticipated creative class: “Toronto – where the taxes are low and the mayor is high”.
It is so easy to make jokes about this guy.
But it is so hard to get rid of him…
It's time for post-fordism.
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