A mob of half-naked citizens formed around 250 Richmond Street West this morning to protest Rob Ford during his radio interview this morning on Newstalk 1010. At long last, angry Torontonians have realized Rob Ford’s true weakness: the naked male form. Why don’t you think Rob Ford ever attends World Pride? Because pecs make him melt.
#ShirtlessJoggers in the wild
Ann Hui
Yesterday, a shirtless man out for a morning job could not control himself at the sight of Rob Ford and launched into a tirade accusing Rob Ford of being a racist. This, for some reason, angered Doug Ford immensely, and Doug was prompted to say that the man was being racist towards Rob.
People immediately began questioning why Doug Ford would accuse the shirtless jogger of racism. Doug probably thought about other words he could have used, but clearly none would do. He may have used unkind, but it is too unsophisticated. Barbarous, but takes away from the blue-collar image. Niggard, but that’s always been more Rob Ford’s thing. Or left-wing commie pinko, but he probably figured that it was too self-evident to even mention.
Instead, Doug landed on a great idea: race is a social construct, which evolves and depends upon the meaning we give to it various contexts. It is for this reason that the jogger was racist towards Rob Ford for his drinking, just as “you can be racist against people that eat little red apples.”
And in that line, Doug Ford gave the greatest argument against race as a construct ever uttered, because if racism can be applied to anything, the term loses all meaning, and we have no tool left with which to shame real, true, racist comments, such as those uttered by Rob Ford.
While Rob’s Jamaican patois is excellent, according to a number of linguistic experts, it is very unclear why he was compelled to speak in such an accent, other than Ford’s explanation that “that’s how I speak with my friends.”
Rob Ford is on record calling people “wops” and “dagos,” saying Asians “work like dogs” making crude remarks about Iran being a place where Canadian women are sent to be raped. Those are truly, objectively racist statements. Rob Ford says that he only said those things because he was under the influence of drugs, shrooms, crack, and all kinds of other mind-altering substances, and had fallen in with a crowd where those types of things are accepted as they are expected.
Whether or not you believe this defence is up to you, and shirtless protesters have gathered to try to get an explanation. They bare their chests to stand in solidarity with the original #ShirtlessJogger, and we believe that the shirt on his back is the only thing now keeping John Tory from becoming mayor.
In the mean time, Rob Ford has a lot of explaining to do, and his definition of racism is far from the most pressing matter.