Friday, November 15, 2013

Let Them Eat Pussy: The Moveable Feast of Rob Ford

I feel conflicted about Rob Ford. On the one hand, it's impossible not to feel a wrench of pity and also a sense of self-loathing creepiness at bearing witness to someone's total self-destruction. On the other hand, Jacobin neatly outlines all the ways in which Ford is a civically and socially destructive asshole of the first order. If he's going to do his damnedest to blow everything else up, the motherfucker might as well take himself with it.

Then we also have to admit that everything about Rob Ford is strangely awesome. Not in the approving, "Rad, dude!" sense of the word, but in the original sense of inspiring a kind of bewildered awe. Beyond any sense of body-shaming, Ford is awfulness writ large. He has the decency to do gross things grossly, where there's no chance of anyone arguing inference and insinuation on the part of critics. You couldn't find a lustier representation of the I-enjoy-now, you-pay-later schtick of modern conservatism. Someone gave Falstaff a city, and all he had to give up in exchange was his brain. It's fun.

Maybe this is just me. I remember basically enjoying everything about Marion Barry. He was with a prostitute; who cares? She got paid, and she was an adult. He was doing drugs; big deal, everyone I knew admitted to having done drugs. I enjoyed the fact that he was pissing off a bunch of Reagan Democrats who spent the sixties smoking grass and the seventies taking Seconal. Meanwhile they were threatening to sue teachers who used harsh language at Caitlin or Brantley, while sporting huge hard-ons for high school principal Joe Clark because he was threatening black "thug" kids with a baseball bat. Not that this was about race.

So perhaps I'm importing certain irritation to the issue, but I thoroughly enjoy white North America having its own legendarily awful public servant, outside of the last Texan president, because if anything it makes cretinous abuse in power more demographically universal—in a way far more immediate than any conversation about the Borgias or Caligula. Rob Ford is a fleshy snowball of casual sins shared by millions reading about him. And, any time I start to have a pang of regret at the agonized display of humanity on the news, I remember some awful thing he said about gays or did to a woman—those rarer, less forgivable sins that still far too many people likely think about in private and mutter, "I don't see what's so bad about that either."

More importantly, from now on, when a hazy shame rolls in on me, I will think about something said to me by a friend who just spent the last two years online pretending to be an automated horse. Think about that quote about eating pussy. People are going to be reading that quote in collected-quote jokebooks in future-bathrooms in the year 3000. History will be kind to the comedy of it all. We might as well enjoy it now, too.

That said, all of this is preface to my reprinting a bunch of tweets of things I dearly hope Rob Ford will do. These aren't just projections of my imagination or suggestions for future conduct on the way out the door. These are pleas.

Please do these things, Rob Ford. Become what you were born to be.


















Posted by Mobutu at 2:03 PM Labels: , , , , ,