Today, let’s consider — after recent angst about the enviably affluent Mayor Rob Ford claiming kinship with the common folk — what it is that actually shapes and confers identity.

How is it, say, that author Joseph Boyden, raised in Willowdale with only fractional native blood, an ancestral fact he didn’t even become aware of until his teens, can emerge as an internationally esteemed interpreter of Canadian aboriginal experience?

How could former prime minister Brian Mulroney, his family generations removed from Ireland, be routinely called “Irish,” along with his pal Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy for that matter, without an eyebrow being cocked?

How is it that the thoroughly Caucasian Bill Clinton could be described, by the great Toni Morrison no less, as America’s “first black president”?

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Identity is not always as cut and dried as a current bank balance, or the product of immediate time and place. It can be a sensibility, an ethos, a psychic inheritance — what has been called by thinkers from Carl Jung to Conor Cruise O’Brien an ancestral or “race” memory.

When it comes to a class consciousness, moreover, we might well be talking about a gulf as big as race or religion. Social status is something rarely altered in a single generation, is seldom transformed by the mere addition of money.

A useful exercise is to consider the spectrum of food. The poor ask, “Is there enough?” The middle asks, “Is it good?” The affluent — who have always had enough, and always had what’s good — can afford to ask, “Was it nicely presented?”

On that culinary scale of class, judging by the photographs of him ramming into his mouth whatever’s at hand, you’d probably put Rob Ford between option 1 and 2.

His critics are entirely correct in saying the Ford brothers have rather cynically co-opted their father’s up-by-his-bootstraps narrative as their own. It seems, in fact, that most politicians anywhere are these days doing much the same.

If they grew up privileged, they instead tell their father’s story, or, if need be, their grandmother’s. Only those prosperous back to the Family Compact are strapped with owning their privilege and living with the consequences.

Critics are correct, as well, in saying Rob Ford cannot know what it is like to be common folk because he has never known that defining and haunting sense of economic peril and the poorhouse being just one bad break away.

What affluence offers, more than any material indulgence, is a perpetual safety net. It forgives sins and failure. It arranges second chances. It can orchestrate favourable disposition of life’s more unpleasant things, matters such as legal consequences.

To dwell as a common man is never to enjoy the comfort of entitlement, the taking for granted. Instead, it is to labour under the unrelenting fear of running short, running out, and having no place to turn when consequences arrive.

Still, we are the air we breathe. As the writer Willa Cather once said, “most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of 15.” So, too, it can be argued, are the basic influences that shape our sensibility and outlook.

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The home in which Rob Ford grew up, whatever its money, was in all likelihood defined by the humble origins and ‘ordinary Joe’ ethos of his mother and father.

Rob Ford’s father, Doug, was as hard-nosed, up-from-the-streets working-class as they come, with the conservative political outlook of an Archie Bunker that places like his east-end neighbourhood of origin spawn.

Doug Ford didn’t move to Rosedale when he made his fortune. He moved to Etobicoke. And the way in which his family loved, fought and played would likely be — aside from money — utterly recognizable to folks from less favoured postal codes.

They would recognize the code of the streets and of locker rooms. They would recognize the tribal attachment to friends and turf. They would recognize the wariness of those from outside. They share the suspicion of those who get too learned, too lettered, those who forget where they came from, or get above their station.

Neither Rob Ford nor, say, Justin Trudeau have ever known the abiding sense of not-so-distant peril and fall that ordinariness brings. Still, Ford is no more like Trudeau than the Steak Queen is like Canoe. And that’s why he connects with the common people despite having more money and Florida properties than most could dream of.

Any working-class guy in town, looking at Rob Ford in a suit, would recognize immediately the image of most every man at every wedding reception he ever attended. While anyone looking at Trudeau would assume he’s worn Harry Rosen from the cradle.

If Rob Ford and Justin Trudeau were dressed in worn jeans and T-shirt and dropped penniless at 2 a.m. in the nastiest neighbourhood in the nation, no working-class man would doubt for a minute which of the two would survive.

It’s worth revisiting, at longer length than is customary, the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald observation about the wealthy. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” he wrote in 1925 in the short story “The Rich Boy.” “They are different from you and me.

“They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful . . . They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.”

Ordinary people look at Rob Ford and sense that he shares their values, their foibles, their virtues. He’s as comfortable in scrappy neighbourhoods as Bill Clinton was in the black churches or as Joseph Boyden is on the shores of James Bay. He is because he “gets it.”

It comes down to this: Ordinary people have never felt from Rob Ford the condescension which insults them more than anything. They have never felt that Rob Ford, for all his money, thinks he’s “better than we are.”

And that makes all the difference.

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