There is almost no depth to which Mr. Ford will not sink in his public comments…Nor does he apparently care that his conduct has made Toronto a byword for government buffoonery around the world. Yet despite what he has put the city through, in the weird public psychosis of the saga, Mr. Ford and his supporters see him as the victim.
-Jeffrey Simpson in The Globe and Mail
A great fool has amazing powers of disorientation: he is an avatar of disequilibrium, a spanner in the works, a local lord of misrule, yet he usually lands on his feet.
-R.H. Bell on Falstaff
When it comes to Rob Ford, political pundits would do well to remember Shakespeare. Although the occasional comparison to Falstaff has been made, it’s clear the appeal of the bard’s most rotund character, in his incarnation as Toronto’s mayor, has gone mostly unnoticed by the intelligentsia in this country.
For those of you unfamiliar with Falstaff, let me try to describe him. He is a jolly, slothful man who makes his living as a sponging petty criminal. He comes from an Elizabethan class of knights, but is so enslaved by his appetites, he’s barely able to keep up. Such is his gusto, however, that most of us who read Shakespeare have a hard time suspending our disbelief in him. The proof? Falstaff is often referred to as a real person in literary criticism, an error most of us are quite happy to overlook. A shameless and loveable rogue, he’s a character whose girth and mirth are wonderfully writ large.
We first meet him in Henry IV, Part 1,as he mentors Prince Hal in the art of being a lowlife. The prince is the son of Henry IV, who won the crown by deposing the previous king, Richard II. The instability in the play resides courtside among the aristocracy, where the king worries about strife growing among his far-flung subjects, and the prince’s escapades in the taverns of Cheapside. However, for all the shadows Prince Hal’s companions cast on his character in Part 1, he will emerge reformed in Part 2, duly chastened and ready to get serious. It’s worth noting that the real reformation informed Shakespeare’s writing and that Falstaff, conceivably, was his answer to the austerity of Protestantism and his Queen.
The same qualities that make Falstaff a legend are there in Ford’s pratfalls, missteps and vices. Whether the Toronto intelligentsia want to admit it or not, the mayor’s sins humanize him in ways they can’t even hope to emulate, leaving ethnic exiles like myself quietly smiling to ourselves. Toronto the Good has its moniker for a reason. It’s politically correct to a smug fault and the Protestant ethic that controls it — like a tightly pursed sphincter — silences with a look and shuns in kind. I spent four years at university there and could not wait to leave. The combination of waspy cool and enforced diversity (Study Slavic writers, Irene!) was confusing and exhausting.
Now I recognize the subjectivity of the experience I’m describing, but a recent conversation I had with a European professional, who took a cut in pay to relocate to Montreal, validated my feelings. She too felt she was either being objectified (as a foreigner) or shut out (as a stranger) and admitted that had she not been granted a transfer via her company, she would have quit or had a nervous breakdown. For a lot of us ethnic types, those white collars in Toronto have way, way too much starch in them.
So despite the mayor’s faults, I sympathize. And that’s because I can sympathize with a guy who falls backward when he’s trying to throw a football or forward into an embarrassing situation when he’s had too much to drink. It’s not as if drug addicts and alcoholics don’t live in Rosedale or Cabbagetown — they do — they just aren’t being followed around by reporters who think those failings are newsworthy. In the meantime other public servants, like public curators who steal from their elderly charges, don’t even register on their radar. In that sense the intelligentsia and their media are being predictably bourgeois.They are focusing on one man’s poor judgement in his private life and secretly gloating at their superiority.
So if today’s Toronto and England’s Henry IV were parallel universes, we would see Catholic appetites wrestling with Protestant principles. Shakespeare’s rosary may have been banished courtesy of her majesty, but when the innate and sympathetic Catholicism of Falstaff is pitted against the cold-hearted Protestantism of Prince Hal, it’s abundantly clear who wins. And Ford’s critics should pay attention. Like the mayor’s serial apologies, Falstaff also has the self-awareness to realize that reckonings, of a serious sort, are occasionally required. Both Ford and Falstaff’s brief flirtations with humility are genuine, but fleeting, because living in the present is what they excel at.
And the lessons in forgiveness go deeper: Falstaff’s mock resurrection at the Battle of Shrewsbury echoes Christ’s resurrection and, arguably, Ford’s pattern of sinning and apologizing:
Now on his own Falstaff is attacked by the Douglas during Hal’s battle with Hotspur, but plays possum and is presumed dead. After Hal leaves Hotspur’s body on the field, Falstaff revives in a mock miracle. Seeing he is alone, he stabs Hotspur’s corpse in the thigh and claims credit for the killing the prince’s sworn enemy. Though Hal knows better, he allows Sir John his disreputable tricks. Soon after being given grace by Hal, Falstaff states that he wants to amend his life and begin “to live cleanly as a nobleman should do.”
Falstaff feeds his relentless appetites, robs his hapless (and rich) victims and provides Prince Hal with invaluable training when it comes to having the common touch. The final deception of Prince Hal — his public rejection of Falstaff — is as deadly as any of Shakespeare’s battle scenes: Falstaff does indeed die later of a broken heart. It’s this kind of social death Ford’s believers see in the offing and want to help their hero avoid. For all the kind admonitions made by reporters and other politicians, that the mayor is a “sick man,” his supporters see things differently. Like many working class people, who sooth their discontent with a two-four on the weekend, the mayor’s colourful responses to the insults coming from pampered liberals work against them — as they should.
The fact is the mayor was voted into office by citizens who supported him. Not respecting his position as a publicly chosen official, even when done sensitively, is, to put it mildly, a blunder and a no-brainer one at that. Critics of Ford believe they are only stating the obvious, when the even more obvious fact — that he was put in office by people who wanted him — seems to be eluding them. Put up and shut up is the message coming from the Ford Nation and the reporters who are feasting on his antics would be wise to oblige.
Another point of contention is the divisiveness of Ford’s class politics. However, that divide has been there for decades and guess who didn’t see it coming? There is a power elite in Toronto, and in this country, who make decisions in their own best interests and forget about the janitors, sales clerks and dry cleaners who make their lives easier. Those are the people Ford appeals to and the real surprise for the intelligentsia, I suspect, is that there are so damned many of them. But that’s the nature of their work: to many successful people they are invisible, something Ford intuitively knows.
So while Ford’s promise to return phone calls might not sound important, it sure is to people who are essentially voiceless. In a similar manner, our media refuse to cover stories of ordinary people having serious problems. There are legions of us in this country who have struggled to help our elderly through a healthcare system that doesn’t seem to want them. Yet virtually no sign of this struggle is being reflected in our nation’s media. Instead of telling our stories, they are busy following Rob Ford around or trying to sell Canadians on the virtues of euthanasia.
Commentators like Jeffrey Simpson are right to point to Ford’s status as late night comedy fodder. But that observation itself begs another question: Who in our nation’s media helped put him there?
