Thinking of My Friend, Lt. General Roméo Dallaire

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Enduring PTSD Ten Years Later

Sunday Morning Update: Lt. General Roméo Dallaire, about whom I’ve been writing in recent days, was a guest for an excellent interview with Michael Enright on CBC Sunday Edition today. Please find the link here.

 

With Lt. General Roméo Dallaire’s flareup of PTSD this week, at the sister blog to this one, The Great Gray Bridge, I’ve written a full post about my experience publishing his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Here’s the last paragraph:

With the 20th anniversary of the genocide approaching next year, and four recent suicides of Canadian veterans of the Afghan War, Dallaire had a traffic accident this week due to severe insomnia and sleeplessness he’s been enduring as these events prey on him. He was uninjured but shaken by the crash. The same day he made a statement of apology to his colleagues in the Canadian Senate, ironic since so few others in that body have been anywhere near as forthright in admitting their own missteps.

I invite you to read the whole post.

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Thinking of Toronto Today, and Friends There

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CN Tower

Though I live in NYC, I have a kind of sibling-city relationship with Toronto, to which I travel each June for the NXNE festival, and which I’m connected to via the CBC and Internet radio; musical acts I follow; authors I’ve published with; and book biz colleagues over a long time, many of whom are good friends. The escalating situation involving their prevaricating mayor, Rob Ford, has compelled fascination among locals and many outside of Canada for weeks and months, since Gawker and the Toronto Star both reported that Ford was seen by reporters on videotape, smoking from a crack pipe. Late last week, TO Police Chief Blair revealed that his service had recovered a digital file of the tape, which had been missing for months (Ford had denied it ever existed.) At last, things may be peaking today, with Ford’s belated admission earlier that he had indeed smoked crack, supposedly “in a drunken stupor.” Right now, at 4:15 Tuesday, Election Day in NYC, I’m still listening to CBC Radio One from the Toronto newsdesk, as Ford has said he’ll be making one more statement on this day. The on-air people are vamping, just trying to fill up the time while City Hall, or more particularly, Rob Ford, has everyone waiting.

An interval just passed during the writing of this post, as 30 minutes ago Ford came out and gave a statement that was entirely a recapitulation of all his recent evasions and self-pitying refusals to step down. He says he is not stepping down, or even temporarily stepping aside from his office. Please note, the photo above shows the view toward downtown Toronto that I had from my hotel room the last time I stayed there, at the Alexandra Hotel on Ryerson Avenue, a quiet street located between Spadina Avenue and Bathurst Street on the east and west, and Queen Street and Dundas Street on the north and south. Nice view, huh? That’s CN Tower in the distance on the left.

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“I Can Assure People, Hopefully, It Won’t Happen Again”–Rob Ford’s Mentality Compared w/that of US Pols

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Despite Canada’s deserved reputation for having a generally more sane public life than that I observe in the political culture of the U.S., the calibre of crazy on display by Toronto mayor Rob Ford rivals anything I’ve observed among American pols. This was especially evident during the weekly radio show yesterday with the mayor and his brother Doug, a City Councillor. Of course, the particular ideological flavor of their mania in distinct from that on display in the States (for instance, there’s no religious rhetoric in their routine), but like many here Ford exudes a faux populism that’s heavy on claims of martyrdom and chastisement by detractors and an unfair media. Again, like many here, Ford and his brother operate in a bubble of their own making, pandering to callers who agree with them, attacking straw figures they set up–ones they can easily knock down–and spewing outrage about supposed flaws in the city, like when a caller claimed he’d observed laggard city workers not working hard at their jobs.
One thing that the Ford situation has in common with dynamics here in the US is that Ford’s followers, or as they’re dubbed in Canadian media, “Ford Nation,” exert a powerful rationalization reflex that’s coupled with an unreasoning belief in their man that’s utterly resistant to plain facts and logic. They do backflips to explain away just about anything that critics point to as evidence of the mayor’s unfitness for office. One example is that last May Rob Ford asserted that no video of him smoking from a crack pipe existed, yet after Police Chief Blair revealed last week that law enforcement had recovered the tape, his fans said, in effect, “How can we even be sure what was in the pipe?” They neatly overlook the fact the mayor had said no tape existed.

Now, those same followers are willing to accept Ford’s vague apologies, even when accompanied by one of the weakest defenses ever uttered by a pol trying to squirm out of an embarrassing incident, spoken near the end of yesterday’s radio program: “I can assure people, hopefully, it won’t happen again.”

In future posts on this blog, I will examine other pols, including Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who’s borrowed many of the same policies and communications techniques that were used by George W. Bush and his administration, including the muzzling of scientists.

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Rob Ford Crack Tape Re-surfaces in Police Hands

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A crazy day in Toronto politics, as Police Chief Bill Blair stunned the city by announcing that his investigators have evidently located the notorious, and much sought-after, video of Mayor Rob Ford smoking from a crack pipe. While it has still not been shown to the public, Chief Blair said it’s part of a larger investigation of Ford associate Sandro Lisi. Charges against Lisi now include extortion, though it’s unclear so far whom he was trying to extort. It could be Ford himself, though if that’s true I guess he and Lisi aren’t such good pals, after all. No doubt there will be more to come on this story in the hours, days, and weeks ahead.

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