Ah bless, the light that burns brightest....


Former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford dies at the age of 46 after cancer battle
17:22, 22 MAR 2016 UPDATED 17:23, 22 MAR 2016
BY RECORD REPORTER
EX-TORONTO mayor Rob Ford has died at just 46 years old, following a cancer battle.



Mr Ford, whose drug and alcohol addiction was well documented during a career plagued by controversy, was diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2014.

Popular with voters, he won a city council seat in a landslide result in the same year.

Announcing news of his passing, Mr Ford's family described him as "a dedicated man of the people who spent his life serving the citizens of Toronto."
Read more at Former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford dies at the age of 46 after cancer battle - Daily Record


TORONTO—Rob Ford, the former mayor of Toronto, served not only as chief executive of one of the most successful metropolises in North America, but as an international buffoon, a symbol of toxic masculinity, and, as has become clear in 2016, the inventor of a new and virulent style of politics composed of equal parts comedy, rage and celebrity culture. The man rewrote the political playbook without trying. Rob Ford died an accidental prophet.

But he was also just a 46-year-old man. A man with a wife who will be a widow, and children who will live the rest of their lives without a father. A man with a family who loved him, a man with a troubled past, who had more than his share of struggles with the basic business of living as a human being and as a man.

For Toronto, the city in which I live, Rob Ford will endure as a permanent symbol of the underlying turbulence on which its supposedly liberal facade rests. Toronto imagines itself, and it mostly is, a city of openness and reason—a tolerant city where over half of the population is foreign-born and rational government intervention is widely accepted. Rob Ford represented the precise opposite of that civic fantasy. He exposed the deep rifts of class and race that run through Toronto. I don't think he intended to. His politics were instinctual and personal rather than intellectual. He won the mayoralty by hammering away at a more or less meaningless catchphrase ("Respect for Taxpayers") but his tenure in office quickly fell apart because he had no idea what to do with actual power, except to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Family loyalty was the best of him; it was also the worst of him.

Even before he died, idiots were asking "Why were we all so hard on Rob Ford?" The Fords were constantly whining about "the media," and how vicious we all supposedly were on them. All I can say is, if there is any reason for a free press to exist in democracy, it is to report that the mayor is smoking crack. The disgrace of the Canadian press is not that it was too hard on Ford, but that it wasn't hard enough. It took an American website, Gawker, to break the story of the crack video, which is a permanent blot on the record of every Canadian newspaper and on the state of our libel laws. The fact that Rob Ford was never arrested is a similar disgrace on the police force of this city. Rob Ford was driving around this city chugging bottles of vodka, and they did nothing to stop him. In the infamous picture of Rob Ford at the crack house, everyone in the picture except the mayor was arrested or shot. And it was because he was rich and white and they were poor and black.

For Toronto, a city desperately hungry for the approval of others, Rob Ford represented above all an unprecedented level of exposure. At a certain point, it stopped being embarrassing because the size of the story was so bizarre. It wasn't just New York media, or European media, though he regularly made the front pages of all the international papers. I was in a cab in Senegal in the middle of his various scandals, and the cab driver, finding out we were from Toronto, said "Ah, Toronto. Rob Ford." A friend I met there, returning from Burkina Faso, said that Ford was on the cover of newspapers there.

The irony is that his legacy is evident more outside the city he ruled rather than inside it. Canada has abandoned, to the absolute maximum, the politics that Rob Ford represented. Justin Trudeau is the new pop culture phenomenon from the North, and Trudeau calls himself a feminist and he doesn't do racist caricatures late at night in Jamaican restaurants. He doesn't talk about eating his wife's pussy to the press. Instead, he talks to the Obamas about how wonderful their daughters are. In the infamous crack video, Ford's most controversial remark was that Trudeau was a "faggot." Well, the guys he thought were "faggots" run the country now.

No, the true legacy of Rob Ford is that he identified a bizarre longing in the populations of rich cities with dysfunctional governments, and that longing is much more evident in the United States than in Canada right now. After Ford confessed to smoking crack, and refused to step down—still one of the craziest political decisions ever undertaken--his poll numbers went up. He stumbled on a fact nobody had realized before: such is the loathing of the political class among voters that craziness will be taken as authenticity.

Rob Ford, like many other discoverers, stumbled on his discovery. But other, more self-aware, more skilled, politicians were watching. Other politicians—ones with more cynical hearts and fewer self-destructive addictions—were learning. And so here we are in 2016 when the most salient political fact in the world is that the next Rob Ford could easily be the next President of the United States.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics...ord-influence/