ROY EDROSO

New Spin on Pim?

That old wheel of Fortuyn, it just keeps on spinning 'round. The exact role of Fortuynmania in the Netherlands' election results is not entirely clear. The day before, National Review Online blogger Rod Dreher gave much credence to a Dutch correspondent who quoted "the old lady who is sewing the curtains for my apartment." Said old lady, in the wake of Pim Fortuyn's assassination, told said correspondent "that she has always voted Liberal, but she's going to vote Christian Democrat tomorrow, because she believes that Christians represent decency."

So perhaps an army of curtain-sewing seniors threw the center-right CDs the election. But that's neither here not there--or, rather, it is there, but not here, where the late Mr. Fortuyn, like Frankenstein's monster, has been employed posthumously by necro-cons to bash liberal enemies on every conceivable ground, not excluding charges (made last week by Andrew Sullivan) that liberals helped cause Fortuyn's death.

But, as with Mrs. Shelley's original, it appears some of Fortuyn's reanimators have decidedly mixed feelings about their creation--including an emerging streak of repulsion.

At the Weekly Standard, David Brooks uses Fortuyn to epater les bobos overseas. He compares the European press to a Victorian gentleman shocked by Fortuyn's red-blooded anti-Muslim-immigration opinions. "In the parlors of polite society," says Brooks, "social tolerance sits side by side with multiculturalism," and Fortuyn's politics called the question as to whether they might have to be separated by force.

Good fun for bobo-bashers. But Brooks is compelled to raise a demurrer: "One can argue about the merits of his platform. One can argue whether Islam is really as intolerant as Fortuyn made it out to be or even whether this intolerance toward homosexuality and euthanasia is a good thing."

One can, it seems, have Fortuyn (albeit deceased) without Fortuynism.

At the Spectator Melanie Phillips similarly sends the Creature after lefties, but shows an even stronger contempt for its loathsome libertarian qualities. Fortuyn and his supporters intuited, she says, that the Muslim hordes threatened the Netherlands' cultural traditions, and they were right--"their precious free-and-easy lifestyle was threatened." Fortuyn et alia fought not for liberalism, she says, but "a libertinism and a cultural nihilism" of free drugs and free love.

In fact, Phillips is not even so sure that the Islamic intolerance Fortuyn feared isn't rather a blessing. "I find that Muslims are often allies," says Phillips. "Their critique offers a salutary contrast to Western indifference and inertia. Muslims rightly condemn the collapse of Western moral authority, the failure of nerve that has created our epidemics of crime, drug abuse, family breakdown and promiscuity...They are right to point to the meaninglessness and vacuity of secular society..."

A dagger at the heart of Fortuynmania, version 1.0! How does the Blogosphere react?

"Interesting article," nod the Spinsisters. "Excellent," cheers England's Sword, "we must ensure that liberties do not become license." "Freedom is not a worthwhile end in itself," concur the Brothers Judd. "Provocative," says Dreher. "All the West appears to be in a neo-Weimar stage. And we know what comes after that."

It will be interesting to see what the Sullivan branch of the blog-brotherhood will make of all this.

Goldblatt: We Found Your Ducks

A few dispatches back, I proposed that Mark Goldblatt "go hunting where the ducks are." Goldblatt had complained that his book Africa Speaks--which, one assumes, reflects his proposition that, after the French, "African Americans would currently rank as the most hypocritical, most paranoid, most pretentious group of people on the planet"--was being "whiteballed" by the mainstream lit press. I advised he advertise at white supremacist web sites, where his message would go down more easily.

Internet capitalism to the rescue! Goldblatt's online bookseller, Amazon, is finding his audience for him. While some libraries have labeled Africa Speaks "gang fiction" (along with The Apple Dumpling Gang and Bel-Air Bambi and the Mall Rats), Amazon has it sorted rightly: Their similarities engine proposes that fans of Goldblatt's opus will also enjoy a compendium of recent volumes including Pat Buchanan's Death of the West; Kenneth R. Timmerman's attack on Jesse Jackson, Shakedown; A Concise History of the Crusades; and The Real Lincoln, a volume which suggests, per the Amazon review, that the Great Emancipator was "in fact a calculating politician who waged the bloodiest war in America history in order to build an empire that rivaled Great Britain's."

Goldblatt needn't worry. Bookish lefties may not embrace him, but his true audience will always know where he's at.