Doug Ford, the Conservative Premier of Ontario, is known for many things.

He is the brother of Toronto’s late, fun-loving mayor Rob Ford, is the canny businessman who led Deco Labels, Flexible Packaging and Cannabis Dispensary to a top 12 business ranking in the greater Etobicoke region for three of the last five years, and is an avid hockey fan who coaches a Peewee team in Etobicoke. What follows is the speech Ford gave to his players between periods during a recent game:

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“Great moments are born from great opportunity. And that’s what we have here, today, boys. This game sits before us like an undervalued property waiting to be bought and turned into condos by an alpha businessman! Do we have the necessary capital to make the purchase? You’re damn right we do! Do we have our mortgage rate advantageously negotiated?

I can’t hear you!

I still can’t hear you!!

I. SAID. DO! WE! HAVE! OUR! MORTGAGE! RATE! ADVANTAGEOUSLY! NEGOTIATED!

That’s better.

You’re damn right we do!!

We have the best flipping mortgage rate in the entire city!

We have all the talent and all the character we need to take this game from the Tornadoes, we just need to stop playing like a bunch of goddamn Midwives out there! You’re were playing like little girl witches out there in the first period. Sweeping your sticks about like ladies with brooms instead of chopping with them like they were axes. It’s like we’ve been cleaning up after the Tornadoes, not dominating them, and the Deco Labels, Flexible Packaging and Cannabis Dispensary Devils don’t clean up after nobody!!

Jesus H. Christ.

Defranco, please tell me I did not hear you interrupting me with a stupid question asking what a Midwife was. I will bench your skinny ass. Don’t think I won’t. I would welcome the opportunity. You just try me, Defranco. I dare you.

Yeah.

That’s what I thought.

Not so tough now, are you, you pitiful little puck bunny.

Okay, now that Midwife Defranco got his question out of his system, we can get back to strategy. Boys, I want you to think of the Tornadoes as a greenbelt that we are going to raze in order to develop. We are going to chop those little bastards down. We are going to throw their nests from their trees and shit in their brooks. We are going to show them what it feels like to be developed by the Etobicoke Deco Labels, Flexible Packaging and Cannabis Dispensary Devils! We are going to bring the full might of the free market down upon their socialist heads!

ARE WE OPEN FOR BUSINESS?

YES!

YES, WE ARE GODDAMN WELL OPEN FOR BUSINESS, NOW LET LOOSE THE HOUNDS OF WAR, BOYS, AND TAKE THIS MOMENT AND MAKE IT YOURS!!!

Twitter was not at all what I thought it would be.

I envisioned a virtual water cooler where all sorts of people–many who didn’t work in an office– might get together during the day to exchange witty banter about what was going on in the world. I imagined a kind of democratic paradise, too, maybe like the ancient Greeks, a place where there was equal opportunity for everybody to be heard, and the quality of an idea was not contingent upon the status of the person bearing it.

Of course, it turns out that Twitter is a tire fire, and I simply could not have been more wrong.

Twitter and it’s 140 character cage, ( now upped to 280 characters ) did not spark conversations, it destroyed them. Instead of attempting to actually investigate ideas that you didn’t already own, people went on search and destroy missions, each Tweet a drive-by shooting aimed at a rival gang. Twitter was a weapon, a device used to amplify and distribute propaganda, and whenever a person was handed this weapon they immediately, without even knowing it, became a soldier in somebody else’s army.

Twitter was not a place you went to freely express yourself, it was a battlefield.

Just under a quarter of Americans are on this battlefield, and from what I can tell the preponderance of people using the platform would be loosely defined as a kind intelligentsia, those with sufficient space and security in their life to spend X-amount of time each day looking to make corrections in the lives of others. These people are driving the culture wars that are currently dominating our cyclonic news cycle, and that, in turn, is driving the political discourse. This means that the vast majority of Americans, more than 75%, are being led down a road paved by this influential, minority group.

Yet oddly, we seem more concerned about conspiratorial fictions then this beast in which we live.

No matter, the people behind Twitter know how dangerous and influential the platform has become, and in an effort to make it less pernicious, they’re now considering taking away the Like function.

Twitter is an obviously hierarchal structure, a place where status is measured by Likes, followers and retweets. The more of these you have, the more influence you wield. It’s practically a board game. The goal is not to learn about other people and their ideas, it’s about acquiring and exercising power. ( Exhibit A: Donald Trump) But it’s not the real world, not even close. The vast majority of humans live outside the gates of Twitter, yet they are directed and depicted, by those within. A technology that was meant to be radically democratic has somehow ended up being kind of totalitarian.

For instance, China is creating a Social Credit System which is intended to measure citizens social and business reputation. It’s a Black Mirror episode, a world in which everything you do is judged and catalogued by others, and it is upon that which your ability to function in society is dependent. In fact, Twitter had something very much like that which they called Klout, a complex numerical measurement of your influence. This is the unfortunate principal on which much of our social media exists, and if Twitter liberates us from it, they will be striking a great blow in a war most of us don’t even know we’re fighting.

As many of you will have heard, I have started a daily Podcast with Heidi, our Miniature Dachshund.

This is an excerpt from our most recent episode:

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Me: Well, that was awfully nice of Ontario Premier Doug Ford to come in for an interview and show us his old shot put from high school!

Heidi: Heidi no get shot put.

Me: What don’t you get?

Heidi: It just metal ball you can’t chase! Why have ball if not chase? Like big circle rock, and if circle-ball-rock not used to crush cat or squirrel or dumb bird, what the point?

Me: Well, as Premier Ford explained, it is a display of both mental and physical mastery.

Heidi: Heidi don’t think so. Heidi call bullshit.

Me: You ALWAYS call bullshit.

Heidi: Heidi calls them as she sees him. Why she respected journalist.

Me: You are a good journalist, it’s true.

Heidi: Heidi know. You could learn thing or two from Heidi.

Me: Like how to eat really, really, disgustingly quickly and spill my kibble all over the place?

Heidi: Grrrr. Grrrr.

Me: Well, it’s a shame that we never got to find out if Premier Ford would have won the gold medal for shot put at the Olympics. He’s right, the boycott back in 1980 really did just punish the athletes.

Heidi: Can’t give communism a foothold anywhere! But still, Heidi think something fishy about story.

Me: What do you mean?

Heidi: Well, if he and famous Ford Pack big part of Illuminati as he say, then they control Olympics. They do what they want!

Sex parties and gold medals and meat fat all the time!!

Me: But if they were part of the Illuminati, that would explain the family’s mysterious rise to power! I mean, his brother, a crack addict, was mayor of the city! How could something like that happen if not for the power of the Illuminati?

Heidi: Heidi know thing or two about Illuminati, and all Heidi say is Ford Pack not Illuminati material.

Me: Am I Illuminati material?

Heidi: Heidi not sure. Heidi very, very hungry. Maybe if she had treat would help her think.

Me: Would a liver treat do?

Heidi: Not ones from Dollar Store, liver treats from Italy.

Me: I said liver treat. Not treats. Singular. Not plural.

Heidi: Give Heidi treat.

Me: Okay.

Heidi: Not Illuminati material. Not even close. Bug Illuminati at best. Maybe dirt Illuminati.

Me: Let’s just move on, shall we? I have to say, I really thought Premier Ford dodged the question I asked him about the #MeToo movement! What did he say? “Shot putters never have to worry about the ladies?” What do you think that means?

Heidi: Heidi don’t care. He use Ralph Lauren Chaps cologne to try to hide smell of lies and anger, but smell too strong.

Can never escape his own stink. He all lies and anger.

Me: So when he said he would rather take barbarism over socialism, you believed him?

Heidi: Two-leggers all so naive. Barbarism only system that works.

In my imagination “The Internet” descended from the deep reaches of the universe and settled upon our planet like a mist. We began to interact with this powerful and mysterious entity without any real understanding of how it was going to effect us, or even if it was going to effect us. Most of us just assumed it was going to make things better, amplifying potential in a good, rather than harmful way.

However, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. The astonishing gifts we’ve enjoyed have come with tremendous penalties, the primary of which might be a massive, unacknowledged mental health crisis.

I don’t know about you, but I have never seen as many declarations of anxiety and depression in my life as I now see on a regular basis online. It’s not at all uncommon for me to have multiple chat windows open at once, each one a conversation with a friend in crisis. This is highly subjective of course, and that people now have the means and social sanction to communicate their feelings might be something to celebrate, or, as my intuition suggests,  it could be something in the disembodied interactions we’ve been reducing ourselves to that’s causing this articulated spike in mental health problems.

It seems that the more we inhabit the abstracted realm of The Internet, the more certain we become of our beliefs. This is highly ironic to me, because we all know that amidst the spin and swirl of disinformation, fake news and uncanny algorithms, we should be as skeptical of claims to truth and certainty as we’ve ever been.

Take the White Power symbols that have been in the news.

As you may be aware, the symbol that you always thought meant “OK,” might now mean White Power.

This transition took place about a year ago on 4Chan, where it was conceived as a conscious lie. What I mean by that is that it wasn’t a White Power sign. The intent was to take an existing symbol and change it’s meaning, thus confusing the public and media and further eroding the idea of public trust.

Regardless, once this meme was in the blood stream there was no way to know what the use of the symbol meant. Did the person know it was a white power sign? Were they just saying “OK!?” Were they making a joke? Were they communicating racist ideology?

The first instance of this that I saw was of White House Advisor Zina Bash during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Based on this image, people thought she was a White Supremacist.

Bash is of Mexican and Jewish heritage, and this photo that was widely circulated was a high resolution screen capture of a video, so she was in motion, not in a fixed, posed position. Claims that she was communicating a racist message seemed to me ambiguous at best. But people I know, like and respect saw this photograph, and others like it,

as crystal clear evidence of racist intent. Where I saw nothing but ambiguity, they saw none.

It felt like looking at the Neckar’s Cube, like some optical illusion was at play and the mechanics of our brains were prohibiting us from seeing the same thing.

There was simply no consensus on what was real. We were living two different stories when looking at the images. Where I was looking at what was directly in front of me, my friends were looking at circumstance, or perhaps subtext, seeing this single image as part of a much greater and evolving narrative.

Perhaps I am antique in my thinking, but when I see stories like these, I look for a kind of “courtroom proof.” If I have doubt, I am unwilling to prosecute the reputation and livelihood of the person being judged, even if they might still be suspicious to me. Maybe that makes me unwilling to act, and if so that is a sin I will one day have to answer for. Regardless, online a “thing” is true if it has momentum, if it supports the continuance of a passionately held belief, not if it meets some “clinical” standard of proof.

As our shared sense of truth and morality fall away– and disagreement leads to suspicion, if not flat-out contempt– we fearlessly share our certainties, but shamefully keep our uncertainties sheltered within, anxious that we’ll be attacked rather than supported by those whom we would love, and that, well that’s making us all feel a little jumpy and untethered.

I have no idea why the guy brought it to me, other than to remove it from his sphere of responsibility, but it felt like a test. Here, I present you with suffering, what will you now do?

The squirrel lay in a blue recycling bin, ontop of some gravel and a piece of tarp. It’s body no longer worked the way it always had, and whenever it tried to heave itself into an upright position, it could not. Imagine the effort– the desperate and complete effort– it must have taken to do that, again and again and again. The eyes of the animal were terrified and dull, and it seemed obvious that it was dying.

I placed the recycling bin in a shaded place, and then brought out some water and nuts, hoping that over the course of the night it might somehow recover, or die as nature had ordained.

I woke up the next day to see that the animal had lifted itself from the box, travelled perhaps 25 feet, and collapsed on the street. It rose to 40 degrees that day. The situation had become worse, and I could see that my actions had been a feckless half measure, designed to make me feel better more than actually help the squirrel. If I had more courage, I would have killed the squirrel. Or I would have picked him up with my hands, wrapped him in a blanket and carried him into the cool of the apartment. I would have done more than the bare minimum necessary to excuse myself of moral repsonsibility.

It’s funny, when we’re on social media we appear so responsive to suffering, so brave. We stand in solidarity. We sign petitions. We boycott and shame. We make bold proclamations, as if calling troops forth to battle, our virtue and sensitivity shining like fires. But in the real world? When we’re actually called to suffering?

Well, I didn’t do much. My efforts were just enough to make me feel better, you know? I got the squirrel onto the grass, tried to shield it from the sun, and once again set out nuts and water.

As I sat at my desk I could see the squirrel through the window as it lay immobile, occasionaly spasming as it tried to right itself. Other squirrels were arriving, not to help, of course, but to take the nuts I had laid out. It was unbearable to watch, and so I called Animal Services.

They arrived, plucked the squirrel up off the ground with an elongated grabber, swiftly put it into a cage, thanked me for my, I don’t know, participation, and then left. And that was that. The animal’s suffering, the animal’s death, was no longer my responsibility.

Whatever the test was that I was given in the form of this injured squirrel, I am sure I failed. And I cannot help but think of myself online, up to my neck in this absracted reality where we’re all so certain we know what the good is, and how to accomplish it. But when I was literally handed a small opportunity to alleviate another creature’s suffering, my intercession was insufficient, and the unintended consequences of my actions had made matters worse.

I will try to remember this as I move through my days.

The event first came to my attention back in 2006 when Stephen Colbert delivered a lacerating, satiric monologue to George W. Bush and his dubious assembly. I was astonished and exhilarated by the performance. It struck me as incredibly brave, a truly patriotic display of dissent that deserved all the awards. It was the sort of thing I could imagine being taught in university classes.

Of course, this was during the era of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, and I was already a huge fan of all things Colbert. The emergence of their shows changed the way that I, and a lot of people, digested their news. Network News Hours were no longer the sole, or even primary means of disseminating “the news.” The dull, superficial theatre of traditional networks was giving way to the faster, more entertaining curation of the Comedy Network. News was changing, becoming something like sketch comedy, and each night we got to choose what sort of news we wanted. Colbert and Stewart were the new Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw.

Stewart and Colbert’s were always very persuasive and funny, and it was easy enough to forget that they were in no way balanced or objective, but as Stewart was always at pains to point out, he was performing comedy, not providing a comprehensive analysis of American politics. Nevertheless, it was around this point that we all started to migrate into separate news camps, existing happily amidst our tribe without ever having to intersect with an idea outside of our chosen position.

And now, about a dozen years later, Donald Trump is President.

It’s my theory that the age of Trump has put a kind of freeze on comedy. You simply cannot satirize the man, as everything he does is so far beyond the range of expectation that he completely obliterates the idea of expectation, and without that there can be no satire. I mean, not a single person on the planet would be surprised if one day he removed his human face on TV.

To make matters worse, we’re so polarized in our beliefs that we no longer have a shared understanding of what is true or what should be funny. People aren’t even certain where power lies right now– just that they have enemies, so, so many enemies! And one of the shadows cast by living this way is that comedy has become little more than simply mocking your enemies.

At any rate, this brings me to the White House Correspondents Dinner that just took place, the one that featured Michelle Wolf from the Daily Show taking the piss out of Sarah Huckabee.

I didn’t watch all of it, and only saw snatches of her performance as it repeated throughout my social media feeds. I guess what I really saw was a meme, and my response was instinctive rather than analytic, and in this peripheral reading what I saw was not justice triumphing, but a person in a moment of power hurting someone else. Huckabee didn’t look like she was acting hurt, she looked like she was hurt, and it made me feel badly to see that.

I’m not sure why this is. Huckabee doesn’t align with my politics, so shouldn’t I take pleasure in seeing her receive her just comeuppance in front of the entire world, all dressed up as she was in her finest dress? Well, I don’t know. I have been furious in my life, wounded so deeply that all I wanted to do was verbally destroy a person, and I’ve followed through on that and let me assure you, there is no pleasure to be had in making somebody cry. It felt horrible to see the consequence of my words made manifest in the face of another human being. I don’t know, maybe now that I’m old and mortal, and a father to a young son, I’ve started to value mercy over justice. Maybe I just can’t find anything funny in this absurd mess we’re all in.

I honestly have no idea.

What is clear is that The White House Correspondent’s Dinner is a ridiculous anachronism, a kind of entertainment award’s show, that should just be cancelled. It was obviously designed as an insider event, an acknowledgment that although the media and the political class they covered had to sometime assume adversarial positions, they were still both privileged, with much more in common than not. And for one night they would all admit they were actually in the business of entertainment and just relax, but now they’re not so much on the same team. Now there are many teams, each one feeding on whatever it is that’s bubbled up from our collective unconscious and now lives in the swampland of social media. Its’ a war now, one with too many fronts to count, and humour is hard to find.

She loved many people, most of them more than me, and my love was cloying and imperfect. I lost her many times. Days, weeks, months later she would return without tears to my shabby and crooked apartment on Coloniale. And I would attempt ferocity and steely eyes, but I was powerless before her. Oh, Monique in new pants, Monique skating at Carre St. Louis, Monique opening a tin of tuna—each moment an act of singular and irreducible beauty.

Her dreams took on the form of divine revelation. Each morning she woke up astonished, unable to grasp the portent of her nocturnal wanderings, but certain of their implicit significance. They became puzzles to solve, ghosts to tend, arrows to follow.

Watching her eyelashes flutter and knowing at that precise moment she was dreaming, I imagined them taking form and floating like mysterious cave drawings in the dark above us. I wanted to pluck them from the air, to preserve them so we could study them later, but even in my mind’s eye they eluded me, curling away like smoke and then disappearing, a trail of phosphorescence reabsorbed into the ocean.

After she left in the morning I would put on the sweater she had been wearing. Intoxicated with her redolence I would wander the streets breathing her in. Everything shining.

After more than 460,000 miles, the 2022 edition of The Amazing Race came to an end last night with husband and wife duo Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire being crowned the winners! CBS spoke with Justin and Sophie to ask about their experience!

CBS: “Congratulations on your victory! Can you tell us how it felt when you won The Amazing Race?”

Sophie: “Oh, it was unbelievable. We were so physically and mentally exhausted at that point that it was just music to our ears!”

Justin: “This was really, really big. I think the only thing I can compare it to was surviving the Black Trump Virus back in 2019 when it wiped out almost a third of the world population.”

CBS: “What do you think was the secret to your success on The Amazing Race? ”

Sophie: “I believe the biggest thing was that we really thought through the Roadblocks and the Detours. At first we were really impulsive, just jumping in very aggressively, you know? But after our encounter with the underground tribes of Cannibal Island, we realized we were going to have to take a more strategic, measured approach.”

Justin: “Look, I’m very competitive person and I always expect to win. Before Peoplekind’s first contact with The Radium, I was the leader of a great nation, so I had the ability to build consensus with the tribes of Cannibal Island, and working together as one, we were able to destroy some of the other competing couples, namely Adam and Bethany.”

CBS: “That looks like a Canadian flag you have stitched onto your bindles. You were President of Canada in the Before Time, weren’t you?”

Justin: “Prime Minister, actually, but yes, it is true. We were known for our tolerance, diversity and inclusivity.”

Sophie: “Canada, toujours dans nos cœurs!”

CBS: “Indeed, we were all very sorry to see Canada burn during the dimensional shifts. So many fine comics used to come from there.”

Justin: “ Yes, Shaun Majumber, Rick Mercer and Russell Peters to name just a few.

CBS: “So what was your favourite moment from the Race?”

Sophie: “Oh gosh, definitely, the Bollywood Challenge we won in Global Sector 6. So much fun!”

Justin: “Absolutely, it was a real game changer.”

CBS: “So as a successful team, what advice would you give to future contestants going on the show?”

Sophie: “You must make all of the scheduled blood sacrifices to The Radium. It doesn’t matter if you’re exhausted or wounded, you still have to perform the entire sacrifice. Correctly. And if you don’t, The Radium will know! Look what happened to the mother son team of Dot and Danny.”

Justin: “I would just add that even though it’s important for you to respect the survivors of all the Global Sectors you visit, you really are better off shooting first and asking questions later. ”

CBS: “Do you have any special plans for the Oxygen Credits you just won on The Amazing Race?

Justin: “For now we’re not going to change. We’re going to just continue hunting and gathering, but eventually we would like to be able to acquire a flesh slave.”

Each person sitting there was alone, each one with an empty seat on either side of them. They had arranged themselves in such a way as to suggest that human contact, or even just the proximity of another person, was a potential catastrophe, and that they might shatter into a million pieces if a stranger’s eyes, voice or touch happened to fall upon them. And so they all sat there– the respectful, fearful space between them somehow more visible than not– and across from them was a wall-mounted TV broadcasting the news of the day, but nobody was watching. Instead, people were looking down, focused on the phones in their hands and the transportive, less mortal moments it provided.

To what worlds, be they small or large or imaginary, were they journeying?

To whom were they returning?

And then I was called forth to have my test done. Stripped to the waist, I lay on a cot while the technician began an ultrasound of my heart. Music, as if from across a body of water, played faint and mysterious in the background. My eyes closed, I lay there just as still as a prayer. She spoke softly, when she spoke, and her touch was so very tender, so holy. The test proved a little bit challenging, and our ams and torsos were entangled like it was a game of Twister so that we could feel one another’s body rise and fall with each breath. It was so very intimate and so very lonely, and in that strange intersection I wanted her to put down her instruments and just hold me. I wanted her to tell me that Yes, everything was going to be okay, and to see the truth of this in her warm, unblinking eyes, and thus blessed, be released into the beautiful life from which I came. 

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Short track speed skating is easily the greatest of all the sports the winter Olympics have to offer.

However, the first thing that we have to address are the catsuits worn by the athletes. It’s the elephant in the room, the resonant fact that simply cannot be ignored. Whenever we’re talking about speed skating—the strategy, the danger, the speed, the sheer ridiculousness of it– we’re also talking about how goddamn sexy the competitors are in those outfits. And yes, it is true, I’m not at all against sexually objectifying beautiful athletes I’ll never encounter. In fact, it’s pretty much the main reason I watch the Olympics these days. The human form– full of potential and ambition– performing stunning feats in it’s most perfect earthly manifestation? Yes, I’ll take two helpings please!

Make no mistake, this is the subtext to every speed skating viewing experience you have.

Beyond that there is the fact that the speed skaters, with their helmets and visors, armed with a razor sharp foot knife that’s about as long as a forearm, look like superheroes come to skate for truth and justice.

These people are weaponized, and the fact that it’s short track speed skating ( to say nothing of the positively insane short track speed skating relay) means that they’re CONSTANTLY wiping out.

It’s so unpredictable that luck is almost as important as skill. It’s a last-person-standing kind of sport, one that’s so cruelly constructed you’d think it was invented by a sadistic gym teacher.

No matter, the fact that a wipeout is almost a certainty, and that a wipeout is usually a tangle of kicking razor blades, a crash could have very dire consequence. And so when you see one of the athletes cross the finish line, know that they have just skated through death, and when they take off their helmet and throw back their head, elated and forever, know, too, that they are one of us, and that for a moment at least, we are all beautiful and immortal.

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Well Michael Murray you may enjoy watching sexy athletes court death (because?!) but give me a performance I can watch later via Robyn Doolittle’s tweeted emojis any day.

Or night.

Because we don’t have cable and I don’t want to watch sexy athletes court death, but I don’t want to watch English villagers disappearing one by one on TVO either.

We get it, TVO. English villages are full of old people and old people are murderers so do not move to an English village unless you’re old and want to murder people. The end.

But speed skating? Seriously? Speed skating?? What’s that – one emoji? Done. Well I’m sorry, Michael Murray, but that’s not a story. So not sorry. Figure skating, though, figure skating is a sportstory (yes, that is so a word!) that a reporter can emoji (yes, that’s a verb – I emoji therefore I amji) for people who can’t watch the Olympics BECAUSE OF THE COURTING DEATH THING, MICHAEL MURRAY!

And it’s just like being there on your couch watching Patrick Chan do his short or long or whatever – but faster. My emotions totally ran the gamut, but like in one second.

Don’t believe me? Here it is.

Ms. Doolittle called it, “Watching Patrick Chan: An Emoji Journey” – so right away a heads up that it might be a bumpy ride. Fortunately, I had a cup of mint tea right here beside my computer, just like I do now. Then there was a Canadian flag, which, you know, I’m actually a down-with-borders type but okay. Then a pair of ice skates (well duh, Robyn). But then, oh my Gord – a laughing emoji! Yay! Wait… what? A grimacing emoji!? Nooooooo! Not again! Too soon! Too soon! Oh sweet Jes – a crying emoji? Already? What the – SWEATING?! Oh now come the eff on – screaming? Really? We’re screaming now? In agony? Or maybe… Ah, never mind. Looks like we’re weeping buckets.

Okay. Well. Glad that’s over. <schhhlurp> Ah, mint tea. So refreshing. And just one more week…