I'm Thinking About Voting Ford – And I'm Not Sorry

    Ok, so I am a little sorry that I am thinking about voting at all.  But if I do waste an hour of my time queuing up to participate in the mass ritual sacrifice of individual sovereignty, it will be to thumb my nose at an ocean of hand-wringers, petition-signers, protest organizers and respectable citizens.  Their politics may be closer to mine on paper, but their tepid progressivism would have seemed more water than wine to their capitalism-saving kin of the early 20th century.  When they call for smart social policy and progressive taxation, I hear the fear in their voices and know that they are quaking at the prospect of social revolt.  Maybe an LRT and some more daycare spots will forestall the class war?

    This is the essentially offensive thing about the middle class response to Rob Ford.   They find nothing objectionable about the notion of neoliberalism per se.  The respectable right was on board with putting an end to the gravy train until with a powerful blow from one mighty paw, Rob Ford knocked it high into the air, spattering sauce onto their fresh-pressed lapels.  The moralizing chorus of the reformist left, on the other hand, owes an incredible debt to Rob Ford for making champagne socialism seem almost respectable by comparison.  The truth about city politicians on the left is that they have no interest in overthrowing capitalism – they only want to smooth its edges so the jagged pill of domination is unnoticed on its poisonous descent.  They are comfortably ensconced in High Park or the Annex, sipping fair-trade organic complacency with a liberal sprinkling of smug.  So to the cuts at the core of the Ford agenda, they are likely more worried about the arts-and-culture glaze coming off their service sector city than they are about the lives of the poor.

    But what of Ford?  This unctuous millionaire who has the gall to live in the suburbs while representing what everyone knows is a world class city.  Why couldn't he live in a condo like the rest of us?  This is the thing about Rob Ford that no one quite says the way they mean it.  Rob Ford touches poor people.  He lives with them, he drinks with them, he even smokes CRACK with them.  Doesn't he know that's totally declasse?  Cocaine is a much more respectable drug, why, you can spend years on the rails and still be elected president of the USA.  There's nothing wrong with light rails but you are positively underground with your slumming it Rob, subterranean in the suburbs!  You've got to get away from these people for your own good, Rob, they're dragging you down.  We're doing what we can for you – the newspapers, the radio, even the streets are all blasting the message that you're rich!  Once they understand you're one of us you can stop going in their squalid little homes, answering their tedious phone calls... don't you know that's what staffers are for?  You must be eating their food, too, or how else could you have gotten so disgracefully fat – you look like a guest on one of those trashy TV talk shows!  Or so the scolding goes from the rail thin yoga practioners sipping their no-fat lattes as they tip the dog walker.
  
  Methinks the middle class milksops doth protest too much about the people's champion.  If Rob Ford's policies are bad for the poor, that is missing the point.  It is not for bespectacled experts to tell the poor what's best for them, a thing Ford at least understands.  He promises them subways, heedless of the cost.  He promises to bring taxes down on people who feel pinched.  He makes racist statements and enjoys strong support in communities of colour!  He is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a blonde buzzcut.  Beneath the mystery lies a simple truth – Ford is a classical populist.  He may not drive down University Avenue astride a golden chariot, tossing trinkets at the plebeians he passes.  But he is a man whose stylistic and political bent is aimed at resonating with the dispossessed, the down-trodden, the self-professed little guy.  The substance of this position and the odious particularities of his appalling policies are entirely irrelevant.  As far as cultural signifiers go, Rob Ford is a greasy dim sum banquet surrounded by machine-cut blocks of uncooked tofu.  Stick him in a suit and he bursts forth not physically but semiotically – subverting the ultimate symbol of respectability by getting raucously drunk in it.  Rob Ford is a bull in the china shop of white, middle class morality, horrifying polite (read: bourgeois) society, a place that moans with only thinly disguised racism at the disgraceful fact that hizzoner associates with GANGSTERS.  Ford says the racist things the rest of the white councillors secretly think, or else perpetuate in some of their policies.  He casually makes links in offensive statements that exist in the public mind – between AIDS and needle drugs, between politicians and entitlement, between bicycles and smug liberal condo dwellers. He is not a chemically sterilized publicity robot whose every statement's scripted – he is a glorious 1,000 car pileup set ablaze in the bowl of a crackpipe to commemorate the end of the war on cars.  It does not matter that Rob Ford is wrong in all of these statements because to a broad swathe of his beloved “regular people” what he says feels right.  He is a marvelously emotive politician.

    But why would I vote for this galloping vulgarian?  I am, after all, quintessentially middle class.  I do believe in the value of evidence based policy making and the virtue of civic mindedness.  Rob Ford's sexist, homophobic politics are appalling to my sensibilities, and his policies hurt the urban poor.  Shouldn't I grab my binoculars and take my place alongside thousands of other anxious urban liberals  anxiously watching the skies for signs of Olivia Chow breaking through the clouds?

    No, because I'm not a fucking liberal.  I care what is happening on the streets and what people can do to protect themselves, to support their own communities, to build their own future.  I know that liberal politicians hold out a hand of friendship while the hand behind their back anxiously speed-dials the police.  I know that the state will suppress revolt, resistance and autonomy wherever it feels these things cannot be controlled.  And I know that a great, rampaging hypocrite like Ford exposes the sneering elitism of Toronto's latter-day gentry.  Let them peer fearfully from bay windows and concrete balconies.  Let them fret at the plight of human beings they would never sit down to dinner with, never dare to do more than condescend to.  Rob Ford may not be doing what is good for the poor but he can look them in the eye – he is a sign of the crisis of capitalism, a leviathan rising from the sea and tearing the ships of commerce asunder.  He can reach into the heavens with his scaly claws and bring the stars themselves crashing down on Bay Street, for all I care.  He is a slap in the face of the elites, delivered by poor people, people of colour, people who do not see themselves reflected in the sterility of the political class.  I do not share his politics, but he is at least spectacular in the original sense of the word.

    I once saw Olivia Chow attempt to address a room full of Occupy activists, shepherded in by some union staffer who thought we would like to bask briefly in her radiance.  Half the room was openly annoyed she had disrupted the meeting, and the other half angrily demanded to know why she had supported the police repression of Occupy Vancouver.  As far as I'm concerned, the radical left should greet her mayoral aspirations with similar skepticism.  I am not proposing to vote for Rob Ford because I think he will do good things.  I don't even think he will win.  Whether he does or not I know that neoliberalism will continue to run roughshod over the hopes of the dispossessed.   But he has been made into a messenger from the discontented to the toffs.  Consider my vote one more fuck you to the people who will swear they care about the poor and can't spare a dart for a bum on the street.

See you in the struggle,

Hugh D. A. Goldring