What is it that both fascinates and disgusts? Like watching the cars in a train wreck piling on top of each other and smashing everything around the disaster, we still watch. We revel in it really. We don't say we love watching disasters. But we do. Because we're not in them. We are not them. We are not the people in the tragic news story. We are safe. No matter what complaints we have, they pale in comparison to that catastrophe on TV. Those poor people. How awful. And thank God. We are dry, in tact, alive. We are separate.
And yet are we? Are we really any different?
Catching the next Rob Ford story. It's fascinating, exciting, embarrassing, unpredictable. Like a child. The temper tantrums are wild, inappropriate, dangerous. Like protecting someone from their own seizures. There are no adult filters. There is raw child playing the games that children play. On a bigger stage. A world stage. To survive. To get attention. To be loved. These are the ways we learned to navigate in our world. To get by. To stay alive.
When a 3 year-old lies on the floor, flails his arms, kicks his legs madly, screams and cries, we get it is appropriate to the age. It's what kids do. And yet, the games of a 3 year-old on an adult man in city hall look weird. But it's not even that they're on an adult. It's that he's a public figure. He's our public figure. He represents us. He is us. And we see us in him, and hate him for it. For so glaringly uncovering the brutal ugliness of being human. Of revealing our humanity in the drooling, stuttering, clumsiness of a lying fool. Turning our own ugliness out to the world. We don't like it because we don't look good. It's not nice. It's un-Canadian.
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