{"id":49780,"date":"2014-09-18T07:30:16","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T11:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=49780"},"modified":"2014-09-18T07:41:28","modified_gmt":"2014-09-18T11:41:28","slug":"lorinc-tragedy-rob-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/09\/18\/lorinc-tragedy-rob-ford\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Rob Ford’s tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not for the first time, but never quite so intensely, I felt yesterday afternoon as if Toronto had become the backdrop (or chorus) in a modern day Greek tragedy.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t say this to make light of Mayor Rob Ford\u2019s diagnosis: he\u2019s a very sick guy with a malignant grapefruit-sized tumour in his gut, as well as a walnut-sized satellite on his hip. He\u2019s staring down the barrel of some intensive chemo and possibly surgery in the next few months. Plus uncertainty. Plus fear.<\/p>\n

To put his diagnosis into the proper context, the Canadian Cancer Society<\/a> says about 1,200 Canadians are diagnosed with soft tissue sarcoma each year, which translates into about 100 Torontonians. Do the math and you\u2019ll see that one person receives that devastating verdict every three days in our fair city. Suffice it to say the news is not delivered to a jam-packed press conference, the shockingly personal details of which are beamed around the world in a matter of seconds<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unless one of these unlucky individuals is someone we work with or love, we have no access to\u00a0their pain and their mental newsreel of awful images.<\/p>\n

Yet we will know all this with Ford, for good or for ill. As has been the case for these past four years, he will transfix us \u2014 not, this time, with his horrendous personal conduct, but rather its converse \u2014 the story of his sudden illness and attempted recovery in the face of a rare and aggressive disease.<\/p>\n

So as this news settles over us, I am consumed by complicated, unanswerable questions.<\/p>\n

Will voters see him campaigning, perhaps having lost his hair, and how are they to feel about that sight? Will Doug dedicate his mayoral campaign to his brother, and how do voters read such a gesture? And, most importantly, how will the Ford family\u2019s sickness-treatment narrative affect the dynamic of the race?<\/p>\n

The rival candidates have soberly declared, as they must, that one thing doesn\u2019t impact the other. But nothing could be further from the truth, because the Fords operate not at the mundane level of municipal politics but rather on some kind of elevated dramatic plane — an imaginative stage that was crowded, in previous epochs, by mythic heros and villains, or the starkly drawn archetypes who populated the casts of morality tales.<\/p>\n

It is inconceivable to me that Ford\u2019s illness won\u2019t influence voter attitudes and possibly turn out. In the same way, his cancer battle \u2013 and Doug\u2019s, by inference \u2013 may well serve as a kind of mute button on the harshest rhetoric of the rival candidates. Do Olivia Chow and John Tory think they can forcefully attack the Ford brothers\u2019 record in office in the same way that they did a week ago? How do they talk critically about two men grappling with physical hardship, mortality, and loss?<\/p>\n

This, surely, is a plot twist worthy of Shakespeare. The self-involved king who demanded a craven form of fealty from his offspring suddenly finds himself cold, alone and blind. We didn\u2019t like him to begin with, but we now find ourselves compelled to pity him and even empathize with his futile attempt to redeem himself.<\/p>\n

Indeed, no one should ignore the cathartic power of the redemption\/recovery narrative, which, in the current scenario, will be far more emotionally compelling than Ford\u2019s return from rehab. At his presser yesterday afternoon, I asked John Tory whether Ford, because of his illness and the harsh side-effects of chemo, should bow out of the Ward 2 race. Tory, to his credit, gave a good answer: lots of ordinary people with cancer, he said, try to live their lives as normally as possible while they get treatment. Why should it be different with Ford?<\/p>\n

He\u2019s right, of course. Yet if Ford does fight through the side-effects of chemo and show himself on the campaign trail \u2013 even once or twice — he will be broadcasting, as Jack Layton did after his first prostate cancer diagnosis, the aspirational idea that cancer is not a death sentence. That journey, I\u2019m guessing, will be dramatic and public and political, and it may well obliterate everything that came before. What remains to be seen is how Doug, waiting in the wings, will deliver his lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not for the first time, but never quite so intensely, I felt yesterday afternoon as if Toronto had become the backdrop (or chorus) in a modern day Greek tragedy. I don\u2019t say this to make light of Mayor Rob Ford\u2019s diagnosis: he\u2019s a very sick guy with a malignant grapefruit-sized tumour in his gut, asContinue reading “LORINC: Rob Ford’s tragedy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":49787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: Rob Ford's tragedy - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/09\/18\/lorinc-tragedy-rob-ford\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: Rob Ford's tragedy - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Not for the first time, but never quite so intensely, I felt yesterday afternoon as if Toronto had become the backdrop (or chorus) in a modern day Greek tragedy. 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