THE PRESS, Tom Wolfe noted in "The Right Stuff," is a Victorian gentleman. After each event, the Victorian gent struggles to find the correct emotional response. Once the correct emotion has been discerned, it is repeated and recirculated with a pious self-assurance familiar to 19th-century drawing rooms. All data that support the correct emotion are emphasized, while all that do not are ignored.
On May 6, the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated, and an expression of troubled concern came over the press's collective visage. This violence is disturbing, the Victorian gent pronounced, especially in a country as peaceful as the Netherlands (the correct emotion to have toward the Netherlands is that it is liberal and tolerant, if a little drug-addled).
But Mr. Fortuyn wanted to drastically scale back Dutch immigration, and even in the face of his murder, the members of the press would be neglecting their gentlemanly duty if they did not lead their readers to the correct emotional response to this factoid. The Financial Times hence labeled Mr. Fortuyn a "far-right extremist." The New York Times called him a "far right leader" and compared him to France's Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria's Jorg Haider. (The Times also called Fortuyn's alleged assassin an "environmental activist"--activism perhaps being the term of choice for the action of putting five bullets into far-right extremists.)
The European press, which since World War II has assigned itself the noble mission of suppressing the views of the European masses, was even more aggressive in repeating and enforcing the
correct line vis-a-vis the newly dead Dutch pol. Mr. Fortuyn, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo declared, was an "incendiary racist" and a "distant heir" to Hitler. The Irish Times labeled his views "anti-democratic," which was odd since his views were being expressed in the context of an election campaign. Aftonbladet, the most popular Swedish newspaper, likened him to a brownshirt--a fascist. In Germany Der Spiegel called him "the voice of hidden racism."
But there were some facts that didn't fit neatly into the Fortuyn-as-Le Pen stereotype. All the news stories mentioned that Fortuyn was gay, and did treat this as an intriguing wrinkle. However, they did not point out, since it would have been confusing, that Fortuyn was actually a champion of what you might call a radical gay lifestyle. He boasted of his promiscuity, of his nights spent in the back rooms of gay bars, the delight he took in the male prostitutes he kept around the house.
Fortuyn was also an enthusiastic supporter of drug legalization and laxer rules on euthanasia. Unlike Le Pen, he was not an opponent of free trade and globalization. While Le Pen loathes what he calls Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism, Fortuyn admired Margaret Thatcher. Confronted with bloated government, Fortuyn once declared, "I will borrow that handbag from Margaret Thatcher, bang it on the table, and say I want my money back."
In other words, Mr. Fortuyn was something of a libertarian, which puts him in an entirely different camp from Le Pen, Haider, and the others. But Fortuyn was not simply a libertarian, he was a nationalist libertarian. Mr. Fortuyn was proud of his country as a haven for liberty, gender equality, acceptance of homosexuals, soft drugs, and alternative lifestyles.
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