With this blog post at the Star, David Olive goes on a bit of a roll, getting in some pretty good zingers at Mayor Stupid and Brother Stupider.
One can’t argue with much of his take, in particular his characterization of the last election as a vote against David Miller even though he wasn’t running. There’s plenty of blame to go around for the success of that particular strategy, but we’ll leave that alone for now. Plenty of other reasons for dismay:
- the hopeless, bang-head-on-desk ignorance
- the adolescent bullying
- the name-calling
- the incessant pulling of facts and numbers from their asses
Nothing we don’t know already, of course, but it’s tied together beautifully with a sad fatalism and a sense that we’re just going to have to ride this thing out and hope our city is still standing at the end of it.
Except for one thing:
Umm … David? Can we … just … Who is this “we” to whom you refer? I didn’t vote for these clowns. From the tone of your piece, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I suggest that you didn’t either. So how do you figure we deserve them, exactly?
That word’s been giving me trouble ever since Ed Keenan used it in a piece for The Grid a few weeks ago. We tweeted about it for a little while …
and then a few days after that, revisited it again. I’m still uncomfortable with the idea that we “deserve” these two. As I argued at the time:
There are plenty of voters who did not buy into that bullshit. There are plenty of people who recognize that you can’t get something for nothing, and that if you want decent public services, public infrastructure, a civil society and nice things, you have to pay your taxes and quit complaining. Do we really deserve to suffer while the city falls apart and our civic leaders aim lower and lower because other voters were stupid? Or couldn’t even be bothered to show up?
(There are, of course, some uncomfortable implications to that line of argument, and I have to confess that I still haven’t pursued it to its logical conclusion. Honesty demands, however, that I at least acknowledge them.)
Related posts:
- @thekeenanwire, #TOpoli and that whole ‘deserve’ thing, redux
- Some late-night thoughts on Mayor Stupid with @thekeenanwire and @UnionSt | #TOpoli
- Core Services Review: Rob Ford is a hazard to Toronto’s public health / #TOpoli
- ‘Respect for Taxpayers’ is a load of crap
- @cityslikr on Team Ford’s bullshit, and our complicity therein | #TOpoli
