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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On July 19th, ten weeks after he had been buried in the little town of Driehuis, just outside Amsterdam, Pim Fortuyn was dug up again. The disinterment was scheduled for 7 P.M., and, exactly on time, a machine resembling a giant spider appeared. It started clawing at the ground, gradually producing a large mound of sand. The whole process--the unearthing of the casket, the singing of "Amazing Grace" in Dutch, the slow departure of the white hearse covered in sunflowers--a sort of funeral in reverse, took an hour and a half, and was broadcast live on national TV. Frequently, the coverage was intercut with file footage of Fortuyn's grieving followers, some of whom had had his slogan, "At your service," tattooed--in English--on their shoulders.
Politicians are, in their range, a little like poets; there are some who survive translation, and some who don't. Certainly, in an American idiom much of what Fortuyn had to say sounded racist. He claimed that he wanted to close Holland's borders--the country, he liked to say, was "full"--and declared Islam a "backward" religion. "Moroccan boys never steal from Moroccans," he asserted early this year in a newspaper interview. "Have you noticed that?" As a consequence of statements like these, he was often lumped together with such reactionary xenophobes as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jorg Haider, and Belgium's Filip Dewinter, his success interpreted as further evidence of Europe's rightward swing.
Yet, at the same time, Fortuyn maintained that he was revolted by bigotry, and his own career definitely would have tested American notions of tolerance. A frank devotee of gay bars, Fortuyn once observed that he preferred a "darkroom," the space provided by some Dutch night spots for casual sex, to the inside of a church. Most of Holland knew that he was in love, unrequitedly, with a commercial photographer, that he had a butler called Herman, and that he was driven around the country in an enormous Jaguar with his two little dogs, one of whom had been named after Herman's ex-boyfriend. ("Put on your colleagues," Fortuyn used to say to Herman when he wanted to hear the Slave Chorus from "Aida.") Often accused of racism, Fortuyn (pronounced "fore-town") retorted, "I don't hate Arab men--I even sleep with them." At the time of his murder, the week before the Dutch parliamentary elections, in May, he was the leading candidate to become the new Prime Minister.
Fortuyn spent two and a half months in the ground in Driehuis, and during that time it was estimated that a hundred and fifty thousand mourners visited his grave. After his casket had been removed, cemetery workers lowered box upon box of farewell notes into the empty pit, a process that was also broadcast live. No one I spoke to in Holland seemed to find the televised exhumation in any way odd; nor did anyone comment on the fact that Fortuyn, for all his Dutch nationalism, was being dug up so that he could be reburied near his summer house in northern Italy. When I arrived in the Netherlands, I assumed that his supporters didn't see, or didn't care to see, the inconsistencies; gradually, however, I came to believe the reverse.
I finally caught up with Fortuyn, as it were, the day after his exhumation, in his home town of Rotterdam. His corpse had spent the night at the airport, and by the time I got there, at 8 A.M., a crowd had assembled on the tarmac. Two striped tents had been set up to dispense refreshments, and a group of teen-agers were handing out buttons printed with another Fortuyn slogan: "Ik zeg wat ik denk en ik doe wat ik zeg!" ("I say what I think and I do what I say!") All morning long, mourners kept arriving--by car, by bus, and, this being the Netherlands, by bicycle. Eventually, Fortuyn's casket was wheeled out from a hangar and onto a chartered plane. A pair of fire trucks sprayed water high into the air, creating a rainbow. Everyone clapped, and several people standing near me began to weep. An elderly woman carrying an enormous camera declared, "He was our one hope for the future, and Holland is now lost."
Rotterdam lies at the mouth of the Rhine and the Maas...
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