PREVIOUSLY: What the Fk Is Up in Toronto?

I saw an ad for an all-boys' school recently which was utterly brilliant in its sheer simplicity. It didn't tout the accomplishments of its students. It didn't mention the facilities available on its campus. It didn't brag about the excellence of its teachers or hint at the advantages that knowing other private school students might bring. Instead it made a basic statement: "We produce men with honor." That's it, I thought. That's exactly what I want for my son. Everything else — the extras, the field trips, the campus visits — they're nice, but ultimately they're dressing. What I want for my son is for him to become a man with honor. That is what matters. If he has honor, everything else will eventually fall into place. If he doesn't, nothing will work out even when things go well.

Honor is conspicuously missing from the spectacle of Rob Ford's pseudo-collapse this week. Comparisons with the Wire and with Breaking Bad have come fast and furious, but the truth is the Fords cannot be compared with those criminals. They're nowhere near as decent. Walter White, in the end, murdered and killed but he stayed true to his own sense of values, distorted though they may have been. He retained at least his self-respect. Omar on the Wire said it best: "A man must have a code." Not the Fords. The Fords disdain honor. They boast openly about how they have no code. "If you come after me, I'm going to come back at you" is their MO. They openly state that they practice "dirty" politics. Yesterday, before his brother's confession of crack use, the mayor's brother Doug openly attacked the chief of police, accusing him of corruption. The Police Chief took the high road and refused to respond. That's because he's a man with honor.

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One thing that hasn't been much discussed about the Ford imbroglio is how much he and his brother pose as "regular guys." They are manly men. They are basically Bob and Doug McKenzie on crack. The principal way they express this hypermasculinity is by football. When first elected, the mayor refused to alter his schedule coaching a local high school football team, the Don Bosco Eagles. It took the intervention of the school board to make him stop. At the press conference where he admitted to smoking crack, he was wearing a tie crammed with the logos of NFL teams. The drinking and the nastiness and the aggression are all a way for the Ford brothers to express the following idea: look how much of a man I am.

The reason the mayor has to inhabit these manly poses is obvious. He isn't much of a man. They have to be bullies exactly because they have no honor. Honor has been a troubled idea for decades now. It reminds us of a many horrors from history. Nonetheless, what the Fords show is a simple truth which is evident to anybody who spends time around boys and men: Men without honor aren't worth anything. Men whose words you can't believe aren't worth anything. Men who have no respect for others aren't worth anything. This is true for men who are lawyers in white shoe law firms and men who are grunts; it's true for sons of Senators and the sons of janitors. It was true twenty-five hundred years ago and it is true today.

Ford is an object lesson in how we should not be raising our boys. If you have no respect for others, if you have no respect for your own word, you can't have any respect for yourself. If you have no code, you have no discipline. And men without discipline can't do anything. Correction: They can do crack. Honor is an antique value. It sounds so old-fashioned. But we need to reassert its importance. Without it, even if you're the mayor of a great city, you're nothing.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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