What the blogosphere helped bring to the surface has now led to a few excellent pieces about the lessons of the crude smearing of Pim Fortuyn. Anne Applebaum rises to the occasion in Slate; and David Brooks has a lovely analogy (originated by Tom Wolfe) between the American media elite and a Victorian gentleman:
[W]hat is interesting from our point of view is that the Victorian gent that is the Western press corps could not even allow Pim Fortuyn to exist. With the unselfconscious instinct for self-preservation that has always been the great strength of Victorianism, whether in its original form or today, the gent had to depict Fortuyn as something other than what he was. The gent had to depict him as a cliche, a far-right bogeyman. To acknowledge the existence of the real Fortuyn would be to acknowledge the rift between tolerance and multiculturalism. To do that would be to explore what this rift means–what it means in the Middle East and at home.
That exploration is impermissible. It is beyond the bounds of polite discussion. Hence, it does not exist.
Pim Fortuyn is dead. In fact, he never existed.
And that is why Howell Raines’ newspaper still cannot run an editorial on the issue. It would require self-criticism. But the best analysis I’ve read so far is from my friend Matthew Parris in the Times in London (reg. req.). Matthew gets how Fortuyn’s sexual orientation led him to the populist right. He sees that homosexuality – far from being attracted to the drab conformism of the modern left – is characterologically attracted both to conformism of the old right and/or the radicalism of liberal freedom. The attachment of gay men to the center-left is an anomaly that has already begun to wane. As Matthew puts it,
In the decades ahead many gays will be coming out in a new way. They will be scaling the walls of the political stockade where they once needed shelter and exploring the wild woods. The wildest of these is likely to be what we used to call the Right but which might better be called populism and which will often have an authoritarian streak. This rightward migration has been happening for some time with Jewish voters and politicians, once a mainstay of socialism. It will challenge and in the end break the Centre-Left’s dream of gathering a rainbow coalition of once-beleaguered minorities to dance behind the machine. As the rainbow shatters, bright colours will dance away in strange directions. Pim Fortuyn was a very bright colour indeed… [The homosexual] sense of not belonging touches off two utterly contradictory responses. They are both present within a gay man and are never reconciled. One gains the upper hand in some, in others the other prevails, in many neither. The responses to a sense of not belonging are a yearning to conform, and a yearning to break free.
Quite. I look at my own writing and I see both strains – toward authority and against it. Now, whatever one might think of this state of mind, it certainly isn’t easily contained within the bounds of contemporary liberal orthodoxy. Camille Paglia anyone? Bjorn Lomborg?
ENVIRO-BORES WATCH: More p.c. crapola from the animal rights movement. You can’t even call a football team the “packers” any more?
“LYING IN PONDS” EXPLAINED: A reader suggests a source for the elusive website, “Lying in Ponds.” It’s possibly a reference to a scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie. Here’s the relevant extract:
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake… [angels sing] …her arm clad in the purest
shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur.
[singing stops]
That is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis
for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate
from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well, but you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just
’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Do my readers rock, or what?
LETTERS: A defense of annulments; an explanation of Francophobia; an attack on single-sex schools; and what Islam has in common with Catholicism. The usual slugfest on today’s Letters Page.
HAVANA CALLING: When I see Jimmy Carter sucking up to Fidel Castro, I realize once again why I wore a “Reagan ’80” button in my English high school. Yes, my teachers were appalled. They probably still are.
WHAT LOMBORG CONCEDES: Whatever his critics say, Lomborg’s “pretty clear that some environmental problems are real. Fisheries in international waters are in trouble. Ocean eutrophication from agricultural fertilizers is real. While half the world’s species won’t be lost in the next fifty years, almost 1% will, and that’s still pretty big. While half the world’s rainforests aren’t cut down every year, there are real problems with small, unique ecosystems being obliterated. Acid rain has ruined some large fraction of Sweden’s lakes. Maybe because he says these things in a matter of fact tone, people miss them.” A flurry of smart, detailed critiques of Bjorn Lomborg – and his opponents – in the Book Club today.
AFTER HOLLAND, DENMARK? Another social-democratic country, governed for long by a center-left consensus is seeing its politics up-ended by hostility to Islamist immigration and the dictates of the EU bureaucracy. Ignore some of the leftist posturing of this piece in the American Prospect and focus on the excellent reporting. Does the following scenario sound familiar?:
Nonetheless, the mid-1990s found many Danes grumbling about the media’s supposed lack of immigration coverage. Despite high immigrant-crime rates in urban areas, reporters seemed reluctant to cover stories that might cast immigrants in a negative light. To critics, the political left’s refusal to confront the dark side of immigration made it complicit in a spiral of silence. And in this growing public discontent, the editors of Ekstra Bladet, a popular daily tabloid newspaper, saw an opportunity. The paper swiftly produced an avalanche of reporting on refugee abuse of the welfare system, including a 1997 print and television series called The Foreigners, which depicted a Somali man with two wives and 11 children who received upwards of $75,000 per year in welfare benefits. The newspaper’s accompanying editorials recommended that the government lower welfare benefits for refugees in order to provide them with incentives to work. This media onslaught immediately captured the public’s attention, and it held special appeal for working-class voters.
It strikes me as interesting that this populist revolt against the elite consensus in Europe also gained force after September 11. Europeans face to face with illiberal Islamism may in the long run be close and fervent supporters of America’s war against terror. Now if only they can persuade their leaders and the media.
FORTUYN KOOKIES UPDATE: An email from a close observer of what’s goi
ng on in Holland relates the following:
This story is getting more interesting by the minute.
This emerged this morning. One of the three other prospective MPs on the List Fortuyn that the killer seems to have had on his ‘hit list’ was a young and virtually unknown man called Joost Eerdmans, nr. 19 on the List. When I saw that originally it puzzled me why he would be on the hitlist.
This morning one Dutch newspaper (the Algemeen Dagblad) reports the following: Joost Eerdmans is a real animal lover, and a member of the Dutch “Animal Protection Association”. Some emails were received by the party sent by the association “Wakker Dier” (Awake Animal) critical of its environmental and animal policies. Since the List Fortuyn (formed only weeks before the elections, after Fortuyn was kicked out of his other political party) didn’t really have a fully worked out policy platform, animal lover Eerdmans wrote back to the people from Wakker Dier, explaining that the List Fortuyn was not anti-environment per se and that he would personally fight for animal friendly policies within the party.
Wakker Dier is an important animal rights action group that has very close ties to Environmental Offensive, where the murderer worked.
Somehow, the involvement of Joost Eerdmans with animal rights policy in the List Fortuyn was made known to Volkert van der Graaf, who perversely decided to put Eerdmans on his hit list.
A spokesman for the List Fortuyn said: “As always the Left abused our arguments and so Joost ended up on the list of people who had to die.” The Dutch report is available here.
The Dish 