Remembering Jonathan Corrie

Originally published in the Irish Times, December 5, 2014

On Monday, a homeless heroin addict died in Dublin city centre. He was Jonathan Corrie, and he was one of my best friends when I was a boy.

He was everything I wanted to be: daring and dextrous, fast and funny. He invented complicated and fabulously impractical mouse traps out of lollipop sticks and ice cream cartons. He climbed to the top of a lightning-blasted tree that none of the rest of us could ascend more than half way. He tried to cut open a golf ball out of curiosity, despite it being universally known that doing so would cause an explosion that would destroy all of Kilkenny. He collected fistfuls of gold medals at every school sports day. He won a children’s art competition with a crayon drawing of great detail and sophistication for a young child: a glorious day of fishing on the Nore, like the many he spent with his father, the banks lined with lucky anglers. Rare for a child’s art, the view is from a bird’s eye, taking in the whole scene at once.

Jonathan lived just up the road from us in Kilkenny, and with my older brother, we spent school days and weekends together. This was the late 70s and early 80s, before safety was invented. Childhood was liberty. The only rule for Saturday afternoons was that we had to be home by half past five. We climbed the fence into Bobby Kerr’s field behind our house, poking with sticks at the flies swarming on the fresh cowpats. The field sloped down to the marsh and the uncharted muddy paths around it, where you could collect frogspawn. Sometimes our enemies from Meadow Way chased us, and we’d lose ourselves among the undergrowth and maybe circle back to the safety of Jonathan’s home. His mum, big-hearted and generous and a wonderfully talented cook, always made the perfect snacks to feed hungry boys.

Then came secondary school, and something changed. Jonathan was a face to greet in the corridors, and an ally by the lockers, but all the things that had made him fascinating - the smoking, the risk-taking, the impulsiveness - felt less like sunshine on a dull day, more like dark clouds over the future. I felt the wistful acceptance that many children know: the path forked, and without ever thinking about it, you went one way and an old friend went the other way, and for now you can wave to them but they are getting further from you every day, and soon will be hidden behind brambles and undergrowth.

Listening to his Dublin City FM interview, I heard a fragile, vulnerable man. He called himself Johnny and had killed the middle class Church of Ireland accent of his childhood, to blend into his surroundings. He had little bitterness in him, just a quiet resignation and a hunger for human connection. I think he’d learned long ago that the world had no place where he felt he could fit in.

There are no simple lessons or easy political points to make from his life or death. He was brought up with love and discipline; his family never gave up trying to help him. He had no malice, no cruelty, and no ability to connect action and consequence. Don’t scorn him for having chosen his life of heroin and homelessness. There were choices along the way, but I think his brain was made so that he couldn’t say no, any more than he could say no to climbing the highest tree.

His crayon artwork took a bird’s eye view of the river, but he never managed that in life: there was just a series of moments and impulses as he plunged along with the flow, and for a while I joined him and the journey was exciting, but I was able to swim back to shore before the day turned cold and the current became treacherous and brought him out to sea.

He was a boy who could make anything, climb anything, and run like the wind.

Somewhere, he still is.

Rob Ford on the couch: Why the mayor is his own worst enemy

Originally published at Macleans.ca, November 9, 2013

Rob Ford is a complicated man, a mystery to himself and a riddle to his city. More than that: Rob Ford is engaged in a secret war against a powerful enemy he can’t see. And his war won’t end until he surrenders.

Who am I to make such claims? I’ve studied psychoanalytic theories, put in my time on the couch and spent many hours poking a flashlight into my own unconscious. The only way I can make sense of the mayor’s behavior is by putting his psyche under a microscope. Why is Ford so fascinating? Simple: Humans love drama. Drama is conflict. And Rob Ford is conflict made flesh.

Take away Ford’s self-destructiveness and he would be no more interesting than the average politician. But what makes the mayor’s saga so gripping is the mayhem he has brought on himself: alienating his allies, associating with gangsters, abusing alcohol and drugs. Rob Ford is Rob Ford’s biggest enemy. Why?

I suspect that behind Ford’s civil war stands his father. A similar relationship lay behind another tale of political turmoil: that of George W. Bush. Both the Bush and Ford sons were raised in a climate of macho one-upmanship, where they had to jostle for their dad’s scant approval. Both men are right-wing anti-intellectual populists who refuse to admit their mistakes. Both feel driven to match or exceed their fathers’ high achievements. Both sabotage themselves in the attempt and ruin their legacies.

Suede’s lyrics, “Tragic as the son of a superman”, weren’t about Rob Ford, but he might relate. Doug Ford Sr., the patriarch of the Ford dynasty, rose from poverty to found the family business and become a Tory MPP. Rob calls him his hero and seems to want to live up to his example. So he became mayor and scored a few early wins. Then the civil war heated up.

Much of what Ford has done is infamous, but what he hasn’t done is perform any of the normal functions of his office: he barely shows up for work, ignores his counterparts in other cities, spends little time formulating policies, planning, or meeting members of council, attends few public events and, when asked, is unable to think of anything he likes about Toronto.  

Does he even want to be mayor?

Yes. And no. As I see it, two armies struggle for control of Ford’s psyche. The army of Ford’s conscious mind represents order, discipline, and achievement. Its flag, bearing the image of Doug Sr., flutters over the capital of his mind. This force made Rob Ford a councillor, kept him focused through a long mayoral campaign, won him a chain of office, regiments of loyal followers, and a few political battles.

But outside the capital is a steaming jungle of memory, fear and trauma: Ford’s unconscious mind. And when the guards of the capital are distracted, the insurgents come out of the undergrowth and creep over the walls. The mayor’s deeper self is pursuing a relentless, inventive and effective guerrilla war against his waking desires. The night soldiers have won many victories: Ford’s crack smoking, drunken rants, racist slurs and 911 calls from his home. But those are merely the headline grabbers. The dark forces within win subtler triumphs: on transit and budgets, Ford has repeatedly sabotaged his own plans and tainted his own victories.

None of this makes sense if you sought public office motivated by a clear sense of yourself and a deep desire to serve the city. All of it makes sense if you learned at your father’s knee that you could never be good enough. Ford is following a well-established pattern.  Family therapist and author Terrence Real has written about men like the mayor: men who are “successful” by society’s standards – who built major companies, or reached the heights of their professions – yet harm themselves, their families or their legacies through addiction, destructive behaviour, self-sabotage or terrible decisions. (Many women have similar stories, but the culture tends to give men more direct access to this particular sickness.)

Real found that such men are dominated by the twin demons of grandiosity and shame. They may not consciously feel anything, but peel back the layers of their defense systems and one finds that they have an overwhelming sense of inadequacy: they see themselves as lazy or stupid or worthless. In the cases Real describes, men like this were typically taught such self-contempt by their fathers, emotionally stunted men who may have meant well but denied their sons any compassion.

So the sons grew up and their conscious minds worked like fury to clock up achievements, to help them run away from the sense of shame. The problem is that shame always runs faster.

I suspect that Ford is also running away from shame. You see it by its absence. Most other politicians would have resigned in humiliation after the least of his disgraces; Ford responds with blame, bluster, and denial. His recent apologies have been self-serving attempts to shut down all criticism while admitting nothing. He claims that he has nothing left to hide, even as he refuses to talk to the police and new scandals emerge every day.

Ford has been called shameless. I think he has shame – he’s just fighting to keep it out of his conscious mind. Like a stern preacher wearing scarlet panties under his black linen, Ford is suppressing his own nature – and loudly proclaiming the opposite.

Grandiosity, shame’s opposite, is the brittle rock on which Ford’s consciousness is built. The grandiose Ford does not compromise. He is only interested in complete victory. He is certain of the rightness of whatever he believes. This certainty won him votes. He could cut two billion from the city budget without affecting services, build subways for free, lose fifty pounds. When he fails, it’s someone else’s fault.

Why is shame exiled from Ford’s psyche? To admit to shame, to apologize, to surrender, you must make yourself vulnerable. You have to trust that others won’t kick you when you’re kneeling. If Ford would admit to his troubles, he might be repaid with support. But Ford lacks that sense of trust. He learned long ago to fear being wrong. With his father dead, his brother Doug Jr. has stepped into the role, feeding Rob a toxic mix of praise and bullying to maintain him in his worst habits. What can Ford do but keep lying and denying?

Still, the unconscious isn’t fooled. It has a single aim: to make us confront all the things we suppress. Why does Ford do what he does? Maybe because his deepest desire is to be respected on his own terms, to admit to his errors and accept forgiveness, to stop trying to live up to his father and to start learning to be himself. As long as the twin shadows of Dougs Sr. and Jr. tower over his psyche, he can’t do any of these things. So his deeper impulses are compelled to sabotage him until his conscious mind gets the message.

I sometimes like to picture the alternative careers of such men, had they been born into less burdensome families. I imagine George W. Bush as the unambitious and genial mayor of Crawford, Texas, much loved by his undemanding citizens. And Rob Ford? He would be a full-time high school football coach, helping the players with their troubles on and off the pitch, lighter and happier than the man we know.

I believe Ford could still have that life. But only if he surrenders unconditionally to his unconscious. Until then, his civil war will rage on. And the citizens of Toronto will be caught in the crossfire.

Tax the sacks: Why we need a plastic bag tax

Originally published in Eye Magazine

Yesterday I bought a two-litre carton of milk at the corner store: four dollars and nine cents, and the nice lady pulled open a plastic bag and started to put the milk inside. “That’s grand”, said I, gripping the carton about the midriff. “I don’t need a bag.” Yes, I was saying, I can bear this carton the full fifty metres back to my house, without any plastic assistance.

Who taught me the iron self-discipline necessary to forego a free carrying device? The Irish government did. Last year, I was living in Usher’s Island, Dublin, when they introduced the tax on plastic bags, and I witnessed the miracle by which the tax became a part of the national identity.

Ireland has an ongoing struggle with litter. Before the tax, plastic bags blew around the cul-de-sacs of grey council estates; they knotted about Georgian railings and hung like ragged petrochemical fruit from the branches of sad urban trees.

The Department of the Environment came up with the plastic bag tax, to go into effect on March 4, 2002. From that day, the plastic bag had a price: fifteen euro cents each, equal to two Canadian dimes. And shopkeepers could sell quality reusable shopping bags at a higher price. Revenue from this tax was to be set aside to promote recycling and discourage litter.

Think of  the Republic of Ireland as a very large village rather than a very small nation. It never acquired the Roman and Anglo-Saxon compulsion to organize everything, but the Irish have a peculiar, sporadic genius for communal action – a kind of population-wide lurch in a single direction.

I witnessed this unpredictable commonality at an open-air rock concert at Slane Castle, where the ground was littered with red paper cups. While waiting for the title act to appear, some kind of group madness seized everybody, and we picked up these red paper cups and hurled them into the air, and kept flinging them again and again, whooping and hollering in a gloroiously pagan war dance. The thousands of paper cups fluttering in the air looked like the falling cherry blossoms beloved of haiku poets. It was extraordinarily lovely.

So it was with the plastic bag tax. How many political initiatives are ever described as a “spectacular overnight success”? The plastic bag tax was. Consumption of bags dropped 90%, and still there was a windfall for environmental programmes. Why was it so successful? Perhaps because the idea of paying a voluntary tax inspired exactly that kind of mass communal movement. Suddenly, the entire nation was remembering to bring its shopping bags when it went for the groceries.

Of course, you can’t count on having a shopping bag every time you need to pick up a few things. So: when you’ve bought six items and you forgot to bring a bag, do you pay a measly fifteen cents, or do you decide that you can carry everything in your arms?

The latter, of course. That fifteen cents could fall out of your pocket and you wouldn’t notice it, but be asked to relinquish it voluntarily – to pay it as a tax of your own free will – and you’ll say to yourself, look here, I can take the eggs in this hand, and hold the bag of flour in my elbow, and pile the apples on top and everything else in my other hand and we’re grand.

I never lost that ferocious self-discipline when I came here. Damn your free bags; I will not take them. Look at you, Canada, you complacent nation, rolling about in free plastic bags like hamsters in woodchips. Where is your backbone? Where is your will? Where is the steely determination that enables you to hold a carton of milk without the mediation of a petrochemical carrying device? Dalton, this is one revenue-grabbing exercise that we’ll thank you for. Tax the sacks. Now.