The end of mercy

Norm Wilner, who I like and respect greatly, recently wrote a screed regarding Rob Ford and why he needs to be saved. It’s not an uncommon sentiment among those who do not like Rob Ford. If he’d only get some help is said so often with respect to Rob Ford that it deserves to be acronymized, frankly, and it’s not surprising that this is the case: after all, if you consider addiction to be a disease (which it is), then it becomes harder to assign Ford moral fault for suffering from that disease. Diseases need treatment, not condemnation, and this is why so many political enemies of Rob Ford have been urging him to go seek treatment, even if it only means a temporary leave from office rather than the permanent exile from politics Rob Ford deserves.

The problem is this: addiction is morally neutral, but how a person chooses to deal with that addiction is not. There is a way to live with addiction responsibly and soberly (or at least as soberly as possible – part of addiction is the constant threat of relapse). Rob Ford, as Norm rightly notes, has never dealt with his obvious problems in a responsible manner. Even now, when he publicly admits to having been flagrantly smashed in public, he’s not admitting to any real problem. “I’m just going to stop” is not the answer of someone who admits to addiction. It’s the answer of someone pretending he’s not. This is vintage spoiled-child Rob Ford, and it was what most of us expected him to do.

Here’s the thing: we expected him to do it because Rob Ford is not a good person. I don’t just mean he’s weak – although he is weak, that much is certain – because weakness, in and of itself, could be forgiven. But in addition to being weak, Rob Ford is a bully. He’s mean. He’s not just stupid; he’s proudly ignorant. He’s arrogant. He’s rude. He’s a hypocrite. He’s a liar. He has a pronounced violent streak that he barely controls in public; Norm says Rob Ford is an “accident waiting to happen” but the police have responded to multiple domestic disturbances at Ford’s home over the years and there is a fair case to be made that the “accidents” are potentially not theoretical at this point.

And if you think that last sentence is speculative, you have to understand this: Norm works in journalism, as do I (well, as a sideline), and we talk with our fellow journalists all the time, and here is the thing: what is being said, publicly, about Rob Ford is quite literally only the tip of the iceberg. Rob Ford’s public alcoholism has been an open secret for literally years; drug use falls into the same area, where everybody knows it happens but nobody can report on it because, after all, if the mayor purely hypothetically speaking stumbles out of a bathroom with white powder on his face, you can’t prove it’s cocaine, and if you don’t have a picture then you can’t even prove it happens. If it had happened, of course. Similarly, if one of the videos the police recovered off those hard drives was the newest candidate for “worst four-word sentence in the English language,” by which we mean “Rob Ford sex tape,” then that’s strictly hypothetical too. Completely hypothetical. And we certainly can’t say if Rob Ford hypothetically uses the services of prostitutes.

And that’s just the light hypothetical stuff. I’m not going to go into the heavier stuff. That way lies madness and accusations of open, active criminality.

I understand compassion and most of the time I preach it. But compassion, when applied to the cold hard necessities of politics, cannot and should not be an endless well. (Hell, even outside of politics someone who actively commits harm – and Rob Ford does commit harm, on many levels – cannot be given compassionate treatment when you need them to stop.) Rob Ford does “not need to be saved.” He needs to be put out of his political misery and exiled from public life. Permanently. I have no sympathy for him, no pity; so many people have done so much more with so much less than Rob Ford it is just sort of laughable. He has been given every chance and he has squandered all of them. He deserves only scorn.

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