A farewell to Ford-ology
Rob Ford gave Toronto media a chance to prove itself: to turn out jaw-dropping tabloid writing and beautiful, in-depth prose
In her great book of journalism, which doubles as an even better book on journalism, Janet Malcolm dissects the troubled, complicated relationship between journalists and the people they write about.
“The writer ultimately tires of the subject’s self-serving story,” she writes, “and substitutes a story of his own.” Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who died last week, encouraged, and perhaps necessitated, such creative substitutions.
For one thing, Ford was (at the risk of understating it) wary of the media. You can argue whether he saw the press as a tool of the snooty elites to which he stood staunchly opposed, or was just naturally worried that they’d catch him in one-or-another of his innumerable half-truths, exaggerations or outright lies. Either way, with rare exceptions — Jimmy Kimmel, the Toronto Sun’s Joe (Night Scrawler) Warmington, American sports talk radio programs that let him discuss his weekly football picks, his own AM radio show — Ford spurned the press.
He regularly juked through warrens of city hall reporters, or barrelled right through them. With so little of the actual, factual subject to draw from, it was only natural that writers from both Toronto and elsewhere have found more creative ways to make sense of Rob Ford, to get to the bottom of not who he was, but what he means.
In his remembrance last week, the Star’s Edward Keenan called Ford “the strangest and most compelling character in the history of Canadian politics.” It’s an evaluation that has borne itself out since Ford’s death, as his legacy has been ruthlessly, and imaginatively, dissected from every conceivable angle. He was a unifier and a divider, a fighter and a coward. He was honest, a liar and even (in the words of BuzzFeed’s Ivor Tossell) an “honestliar.” He was “the everyman’s saviour” (says the National Post’s Richard Warnica), suburbia’s “avatar of resentment” (the New Republic’s Jeet Heer), he was “the kind of symbol that we didn’t know we needed” (NOW Magazine’s Jonathan Goldsbie).
Rob Ford meant anything and everything — not least of all to the people who wrote about him. He was sort of like the shark in the movie Jaws: a master metaphor that can be made to fit any and every allegorical reading of the film itself.
That I can even, right now, reasonably compare him to “the shark in the movie Jaws” is just further proof of this symbolic pliability.
In a way, Rob Ford’s mayoralty seemed like an offering to city hall reporters more accustomed to the humdrummery of transit funding and zoning. It’s like being a sports reporter working the professional darts beat who is rewarded for their dogged diligence with some brash, outspoken, ridiculously charismatic Bad Boy of Professional Darts.
The Keenans, Goldsbies, Night Scrawlers, Kevin Donovans, Daniel Dales, Robyn Doolittles and other local Fordologists trailed the mayor like a shadow, to suburban backyard BBQs and exurban housing projects they might have never visited, expanding their understanding of the city (and that of their readers) in the process.
For the better part of a decade, Rob Ford gave the Toronto media plenty of occasions to prove itself: to turn out not only jaw-dropping tabloid stuff about secret videos and body doubles named “Slurpy,” but intelligent, important and often deeply affecting prose that proved how powerful civic journalism can be when it’s given the right subject. Few journalists are gifted with such subjects. Frost had Nixon. Lester Bangs had Lou Reed. Howard Cosell had Muhammad Ali. Barbara Walters had Monica Lewinsky. Toronto had Rob Ford.
“What will we do without him?” Keenan asked of Ford. It’s hard to say, exactly.
It’s sort of like when George W. Bush left office and standup comics had to chuck all the boy-prince, “American Idiot” stuff from their sets. Toronto has lost its champion, its nemesis, its unifier and divider, its truth-teller/liar/honest-liar, its manyfaced avatar of different kinds of resentments. It has lost its master metaphor.
As to the question of what to do next? Well, there’ll always be the decidedly less sexy scrums about Metrolinx subsidies, mixed-income housing and bike lanes on Bloor. I guess I can only hope that Ford’s troubled, complicated political life leaves a residual impact on the way the press, and their public, conceive of local journalism — that the legacy of thoughtful, hypercritical civic engagement that Rob Ford encouraged, and necessitated, far outlasts him.
John Semley is a freelance writer.