While Rob’s admission that he’s tried every drug you could ever think of (in an interview with the CBC earlier this week) sparked unsurprising headlines across the country, and made people question what Rob Ford is like on mushrooms, the deeper issue of corruption and abuse of his position as Toronto’s supreme leader is a more relevant, and underreported angle.
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Rob Ford is still, somehow, the mayor of Canada’s largest city, and the readership of the big Canadian media outlets have an obvious interest in keeping up to date with his latest gaffes, fuck-ups, and catastrophes. And yet, there is a small movement called FIRM (Ford Idiocy Resistance Movement), coined by Andrew Mitrovica for iPolitics, which strives to ignore Rob Ford regardless.
FIRM’s 41-point manifesto has such directives as: “We will not give a damn about anything the Fords say or do—unless, of course, they’re in handcuffs being escorted into a police cruiser,†“We will not believe anyone in or outside the media who utters these silly words: ‘Rob looks like a changed man.’ or ‘Rob’s ready to go back to work,’†and “We will not use the term ‘Ford Nation’ ever again.â€
While such a philosophy is certainly tempting—especially since the thought of how much nonsense Robbie can potentially spew between now and the October election is dizzying—Rob Ford has an uncanny ability to vacuum the media's attention into his bulbous orbit. The man has only been back at work for a few days, and he's already attracted the very public ire of an angry, shirtless man, who in turn became a national news story, which deflected the root of the shirtless man’s rant into a meme about shirtlessness itself.
Rob Ford is highly skilled at the martial art of being a media-manipulator savant. That’s a gift. And such a gift is hard to avoid noticing.
So if ignoring him isn't reasonable, then the hard questions should be asked continuously until the guy either resigns or gets voted out in October. Toronto deserves better than a racist crack-smoker who can’t be bothered to discuss his hateful rants, his association with criminals, his impact on Toronto’s Dixon neighbourhood, and so on.
But, if he does manage to win another election, then I’ll be voting for the Shirtless Jogger in 2018! Because Toronto’s had to deal with mayors who wear shirts for far too long.
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