Read Online Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma - Free Book Online Page B

Fortuyn was a master of emotional kitsch.
    Again, class has little to do with it. Fortuyn’s funeral has been compared to that of Princess Diana, a real aristocrat who behaved like an excluded outsider, which, in a way, she was too. Some people claimed that her demise shook them up more than the death of an intimate friend, or even a husband or parent, an astonishing confession. Diana also had a natural bent for kitsch. She brought pop culture to the British monarchy and turned the institution into a soap opera. Spectacle always was part of politics, of course, monarchist or not. What Fortuyn had in common with Princess Diana was not just his embrace of showbiz as a political tool—Silvio Berlusconi, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Ronald Reagan had done that as well—but his instinct for pop sentimentality.
    Fortuyn has been compared to the popular Dutch singer André Hazes, a man with the looks and build of a longdistance truck driver and the dress sense of a 1970s lounge singer in Las Vegas: white suits, open shirts, chunky gold chains. This lachrymose wailer of songs with such titles as “Lonely Christmas,” or “She Believes in Me,” or “TheKite”—about a small boy who ties a letter to his kite, destined for his mother in heaven—abused his tattooed body so badly with drink that he died at the age of fifty-three, two years after Fortuyn was killed.
    Fifty thousand people filled the largest soccer stadium in Amsterdam, where Hazes’s coffin was displayed on the kickoff point—the altar, as it were, in the giant open-air cathedral of popular sentiment—and thousands more stood outside watching the events on huge screens. Job Cohen, the Amsterdam mayor, told the masses that when Hazes wrote his songs “he dipped his pen in his heart.” The occasion was like a religious jamboree, with much singing, mournful silences, and testimonials from friends and relatives, including the singer’s ten-year-old son, who cried, “Papa, I love you!” National radio stations played “She Believes in Me” one more time. His ashes were blasted over the North Sea from a cannon. The same woman who said that men like Pim Fortuyn are born only once in a thousand years mentioned one other example of similar rarity and eminence: André Hazes.
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    W hat, then, was Fortuyn’s message to the people who adored him? What deliverance did he promise? I think it was a nostalgic dream born of his own sense of isolation. 6 Like many people, in France as well as in the Netherlands, who voted against the proposed constitution for the European Union in 2005, Fortuyn thought of Europe as a place without a soul, an abstraction that appealed only to top politicians, elite cultural figures, international businessmen, Our Kind of People on a European scale. In his vision, a national community should be like a family, which shares the same language, culture, and history. Foreigners who arrived with their own customs and traditions disturbed the family-state. “How dare you!” he fulminated against such aliens in one of his columns: “This is our country, and if you can’t conform, you should get the hell out, back to your own country and culture.” 7 What mattered in the ideal family-state wasn’t class, it was “what we want to be: one people, one country, one society.”
    Despite his protests to the contrary, this kind of thing did put Fortuyn in the same camp as right-wing populists in other parts of Europe. Yet he came to his vision from a different angle, not the murky Nazi revanchism of Jörg Haider, or the bitterness of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s memories of fighting Arabs in Algeria, but from his own sense of detachment. If he couldn’t belong to any existing community, he would invent one. To establish his idealized vision of a Dutch family-state, the people would need a leader to guide them. “A leader of substance,” he wrote,