Distinctively Toronto

"There's no way to deny that the Rob Ford saga kept us all glued to our televisions and computer screens for months. Canadian friends and colleagues would return home from vacations to report that as soon as they met locals in places like Hawaii or England or California, the first thing they were asked was about Ford."
"Unfortunately, while so many great things were done by Canadians this year, including Alice Munro winning the Nobel Price [for literature], they ended up being overshadowed by whatever the latest mind-boggling development was out of Toronto City Hall."
Stephanie Coombs, managing editor, Edmonton Journal

Toronto City Mayor Rob Ford signs a bobble head bearing his likeness, as over 1,000 people queued at city hall in Toronto on Friday, December 20 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

In the annals of "Go Figure" there are doubtless other conundrums that reason and common sense cannot come to grips with. For sheer public idiocy what could possibly trump the obvious fascination with which the great unwashed greet any new revelations about the bobble-headed exploits of this man so completely at ease with himself that he cannot be fazed by the prospect of newly-moronic stunts hitting the news.

 

His tawdry preference for the companionship of goons, thugs, drug pushers and others of Toronto's criminal class has been revealed, as has his penchant for reaching a point of alcohol consumption rendering him sloppily inebriated at public events, and his furtive missions to purchase recreational drugs -- all pointing out the man's low character and unabashed indulgence in the illicit. All belying the gravity of his elected position as mayor of Canada's largest -- and now most belittled city.

Why the fascination by the public for a man of such incredibly wretched character? But that fascination is there, and tracking of Internet searches reveal that his name has been a source of curiosity for more 'research' leading to ever more titillating revelations about this village moron with a curiously strange coterie of friends in high political places, along with those in the voting public who support him as an individual whose preferences and life-choices most closely reflect their own.

The obvious takeaway from all of this is that it is absolutely true that most people couldn't think their way out of an irritating child's verbal puzzle with any degree of distinction. A second set of Toronto's finest citizens stood for hours, forming extremely long and patient line-ups for the privilege of acquiring another batch of those Bobblehead Bedlam II plastic Rob Ford dolls on Friday.

The lineup was initiated before sunrise and made its long way around the rotunda at City Hall and halfway around the building, on a nasty cold day of drizzle. "I stood in line for two hours for the (previous issue of) bobbleheads and didn't get one. He's a hero. He's awesome. He parties. He's a lot more real than anyone else", commented one woman casually revealing herself as a sturdy admirer of the indomitably asinine mayor.

When Ford arrived, cheers rose from the waiting throng, anxious to be personally noticed by the great man with a handshake and a smile. And then he settled down to the onerous task of signing the $20 dolls. A toy he must be inordinately proud of, like a touched-up portrait of someone lacking grace and presence, but whose photo-shopped image reveals them to be urbane, sophisticated, the very picture of cosmopolitanism.

The face of the doll, unlike that of the real McCoy, almost attractive in its presentation, its physique merely moderately beyond average, having little in common, in fact, with the reality of the morbidly rotund mayor of Toronto whose dominance in the news has been a source of miserable irritation to those among Toronto's residents with some residue of intelligence.

Toronto, which has enjoyed thinking of itself as a world-class city, surely now can be regarded as such. Having outdone itself by its election of a world-class stumblebum, whose rough edges were not properly evaluated because too much flesh had covered them, but were latterly revealed to the huge chagrin of those whose grey matter remains intact.

Forever sanctimoniously humble and obligingly apologetic lest lawsuits beggar his bank account, he indulges in the fantasy delusion that he is the very picture of an average Torontonian. "I'm not a celebrity. It's very humbling. I've never seen this before I really appreciate the support. I'm just an average person", he is quoted as having said. And one cannot help a shudder at the thought that he may just be right.

Perhaps we can comfort ourselves by the thought that Rob Ford is simply Toronto's mayor. Silvio Berlosconi, on the other hand, another class-act politician on a somewhat different scale and value set, perhaps even more deserving of cringing embarrassment to the Italians than the humiliation that Torontonians have undergone, was president of the entire country.

Unabashed public social-political lunacy recognizes no geographic borders.