Out of all the things that have come out of Rob Ford’s mouth, no one could have guessed that the next thing would have been smoke from a crack pipe.
About three weeks prior to the time of this publication, several journalists revealed that they had viewed a cellphone video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine. With his rocky past including a DUI, a marijuana possession charge, being drunkenly thrown out of a Leaf’s game, along with a novel of various other shenanigans, many were not too shocked upon hearing this news.
In addition to the mayor of the largest city in Canada allegedly smoking crack (really stop and think about this for a moment), an onslaught of other bizarre occurrences have sprung from this situation:
- Ford failed to comment on this crack-smoking video for a full week after allegations hit the news. When he finally gave a statement he said, “I do not use crack cocaine nor am I an addict of crack cocaine;” a sentence set in the present tense, causing many to analyze its truthfulness.
- Website Gawker began a “Crackstarter” campaign and raised over $200,000 in order to purchase the video, but the drug-dealing video owners disappeared and failed to collect their ransom. When the video owners got back into contact with the publication, they claimed the clip was “gone.”
- A photo has been circling which pictures Ford and three other men, which purportedly ties him to those in the drug scene. Anthony Smith was one of the men in the photo, and he was murdered in a shooting in March, while Muhammad Khattak, who was also pictured in the photo, was injured in that same shooting.
- Mayor Ford told senior aides at a city hall meeting that he knew where the video was despite him denying its existence to the press. He recited an exact location of the video to an apartment complex in Toronto. A shooting occurred on the same floor of this complex soon after.
- Many conspiracy theories have popped up such as: (1) Rob Ford bought the alleged video, (2) Anthony Smith’s murder is connected, and (3) It’s a Toronto Star conspiracy
- Newer revelations say there is a man named “Slurpy” who is Ford look-a-like, someone who has considered making a fraudulent crack video to discredit the whole thing.
It is almost a real-life representation of Poe’s Law; an observation that is difficult, if not impossible to distinguish between parody and reality, since both seem equally insane. But without the release of the real video, we are all left questioning the validity of the situation. The whole thing would almost be more believable if we were told it was just an elaborate joke, but alas we are stuck being skeptics until its release.
Out from the rubble of the peculiar have been many parodies referencing this Rob Ford scandal. Website dailycurrant.com published an article about Ford blaming this video on his twin brother Mike, and the comment section following this article showed that many believed it and then shared it via social media as if it were a real news story.
Another article published by slate.com gave readers a quiz on “Who Said It: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford or Simpsons Mayor Diamond Joe Quimby?”, with many Ford and Quimby quotes being totally indistinguishable. Apparently the cartoon satirical-parody version of a mayor, Diamond Joe Quimby, is not so dissimilar to real-life mayor Rob Ford.
It is unfortunate that with the release of the information about this alleged video along with the bizarre news stories that have been written about it (whether based in truth or fiction), that many are finding these extreme parodies indistinguishable to the real thing. Apparently we are living in a time where real-life news is so strange, we almost don’t need satire.
Where will “crackgate” take us in the near future? Well, it’s difficult to predict, though in the meantime we can brush up on some of our deciphering skills and figure out what may be fact and what may be fiction.