John Walker: A man of no importance

I like the right and all, but really, conservatives should stop smearing Marin County, California. Consider these quotes, written no doubt while the writer was indulging in a session of superior sneering:

Spann is a red-state guy, Walker a blue-stater…Walker comes from a wishy-washy, whatever-floats-your-boat family living in the shadow of -- where else? -- San Francisco.

…what a journey for an American boy from Marin County, where all the cliché obsessions of shallow California--wine, therapy and real estate--flourish without irony…This is a world where learning is self-referential, where adults are only broadly tolerant. There are no external yes's and no's, or rights and wrongs here, just the fashionable relativism (Islam is as good as the family Catholicism) that makes places like Marin so cool.

Mr. Walker is for real -- born John Lindh in 1981, and from that bastion of well-heeled dopehead progressivism, California's affluent Marin County… The marvel is that, after labouring under the twin burdens of the education system's multicultural orthodoxies and the preening moral superiority of their Boomer parents, no more Bay Area teens have signed on with Mullah Omar.

I like all three of these writers, but they're quite mistaken here. Someone on the Right has to stand up to these wrong-headed claims about our liberal friends down in Marin County, so I guess I'll give it a try.

Ever since the election, the false myth of an America, culturally and politically divided along the lines of the conservative Bush-voting "Red States" and the liberal Gore-supporting "Blue States" had been perpetuated to the detriment of our political discourse. Supposedly, never the twain shall meet. I've never bought into this new paradigm because it's a drastic simplification of a complex social reality. But like all simplifications, this concept is easy to grasp and easy to communicate to a mass audience, so consequently, commentators have grabbed hold of it and used it to push forward their own partisan cases. The result is stereotyping and overgeneralization on a massive scale, as in this case with the conservatives and how they treat Marin County, California, or "Gore Country" in general.

Since when did geography play such a decisive factor in shaping a person's character? Just because John Walker was born in Marin County and John Spann was a good, old boy from Alabama doesn't mean a thing. Geography is not fate. Regarding a New York Times profile of the two men which played this up, Andrew Sullivan wrote: "The thing that stood out most starkly is the blue-red split. In fact, both are almost absurd stereotypes of each part of America." It seemed absurdly stereotypical because it probably was. The attempt to turn the heroic and patriotic Spann into a typical product of a conservative upbringing and to smear Walker as an example of what happens when you give a child a liberal education is quite frankly, ideological nonsense.

How are we to know that Spann was a typical Bush-voting right-winger, as some conservatives seem to be too eager to portray him as? For all we know, he could have voted for Ralph Nadar last November. And does it really matter what his political beliefs were? Of course not. His brave actions spoke far more eloquently for what his true character was than any political manifesto. And what about Spann's partner, the anonymous "Dave," who tried so desperately to save him? If "Dave" turned out to be, say, a native of Ithaca, New York, the great red-blue theory is blown right out of the water. What many conservatives seem to be implying regarding John Walker is that just because your grew up in Marin County or you have a liberal, hippie upbringing or you have leftist political beliefs, you can't fundamentally be a patriotic American, which is manifestly a lie.

How many American traitors in this war have the "Blue States" so far produced? One; not a hundred, not a thousand, just one. Mark Steyn wonders in his article why Marin County hasn't produced more traitors. Well, quite possibly because John Walker is so obviously a single isolated phenomenon and not a typical product of "Gore Country" thinking. If Marin County had produced, say, five guys fighting for the Taliban, then there might a case, but one traitor does not turn San Francisco into a hotbed of anti-Americanism nor does it turn the Blue States into incubators of a potential fifth column. It is a most unfortunate coincidence that the one traitor had to be from Marin County, thus allowing conservatives to throw around their very favourite "Gore Country" stereotypes, but that's just what it was, a coincidence. If Walker had turned out to be from Texas, then we wouldn't be even having this argument. Instead, liberals would most probably be saying that Walker was a product of a "typical" Texas upbringing and that this led naturally to his fighting for a bunch of "right-wing" religious fanatics.

How are these right-wing smears against the "shallow," "dopehead" San Francisco Bay Area any different from Paul Begala's infamous (and justifiably much criticized) rant during the election about Bush-voting states being hotbeds of white racism and redneck homophobia? Mark Steyn has the temerity of accusing Walker's parents, whom he definitely does not know, of "preening moral superiority," but much of his article is nothing more than an exercise in preening moral superiority by the New Hampshire-based Steyn over those yogurt-eating, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie leftovers down by California way. In both Begala's and Steyn's articles, the writer is indulging in stereotyping both his presumed political opponents and entire areas of the United States for the sake of advancing a partisan ideological position. I expect nothing less from a liberal hack such as Begala, but such impoverished intellectual posturing is unworthy of Steyn. If we turn Walker into a symbol of what liberalism does to rot your mind, then not only are we overgeneralizing, we are smearing those liberals who have been supporting this war all along.

But it isn't just the Right who holds up John Walker as a typical product of "Gore Country." Liberals themselves seem to indulge in this shallow-minded practise. Mark Steyn writes regarding a San Francisco Chronicle defence of Walker:

As one headline put it: "A Product Of Bay Area Culture." Exactly, I thought. But, this being the San Francisco Chronicle, they were applying the label with pride. Rhapsodizing about the area's "religious tolerance" and the way children are taught "to accept other cultures" and value "critical thinking about the U.S. role in the world," senior writer Louis Freedberg concluded that Walker's only misfortune was that "his search for identity intersected precisely with the World Trade Center attacks."

Yet again, the writer is playing to our stereotypes of what "a product of Bay Area culture" would be like, but because he comes from the Left instead of the Right, he thinks this is a good thing. Well, if betraying the country of your birth is a good thing, I suggest Louis Freedberg go back and do some "critical thinking" of his own. His mind could do with some using once in a while.

The big problem I have with turning John Walker into a simple product of either his upbringing, geographical location, or cultural milieu, as the above writers seemed to have done, is that it subtly robs Walker of any responsibility for his actions. It's like the bank robber who says that he went into a life of crime because he had a bad childhood, or those leftists who excuse black violence as a result of their "culture" as if those blacks didn't know any better, and who always put the blame on the surrounding oppressive "white" power structure. If John Walker really is a typical product of what happens if you are brought up in the liberal culture of the Bay Area, as the conservatives have argued, then surely Walker didn't know any better since the culture he was brought up in didn't have any counterexamples to thwart his growing moral nihilism. And if that is true, then the real blame lies not on Walker's shoulders (since he was merely a naïve 20-year old whose actions were inevitable given his upbringing and cultural milieu), but on the surrounding culture which produced him. This neatly reproduces Freedberg's argument for why we should let John Walker go unpunished. Blaming the surrounding culture for a person's actions instead of the person himself is a fundamentally left-wing premise, yet in smearing Marin County and the Bay Area as hotbeds of anti-Americanism, the terms of Freedberg's argument have already been accepted by right-wingers such as Steele and Steyn. It absolves of Walker of ultimate responsibility. We're all now victims of our upbringing.

But making John Walker into a symbol of "Bay Area culture" or "liberalism" or "critical thinking" is symptomatic of a larger question. Why should we turn John Walker into a symbol of anything at all? In their search for larger meaning, commentators tend to overinflate the importance of things, so that single events or persons become symbols of larger trends in our society, even when those trends manifestly don't exist. Remember how the killing of James Byrd was a "symbol" of growing racism in America and what would happen to blacks if George W. Bush was elected? Wrong. Or how the horrific murder of Matthew Shepard was "symbolic" of a massive wave of homophobia sweeping the nation? Wrong again. Hence, we see conservatives turn Walker into a symbol of liberal nihilism, even though, as I point out above, this brand of "liberalism" has produced exactly one traitor so far. Jonah Goldberg in his article, "Freedom Kills," argues that Walker is a symbol of what happens if you raise children according to the principles of cultural libertarianism. Yet it cuts both ways. A reader wrote in to Andrew Sullivan making a fairly convincing case that far from being the inevitable product of hippie parents and a liberal upbringing, Walker is in fact, a right-wing religious fanatic:

I am not sure how a religious fundamentalist and zealot like John Walker is an embodiment of the American Hating Left. He is a right wing religious nut just like the guy arrested here in Cincinnati last week for sending fake anthrax to abortion clinics. While you may be correct that his permissive parents and his multicultural context may have produced him (sounds like something some right wing nut case would say about homosexuality, right Andrew?), what it produced was a right wing Islamic religious nut who hates the West and America for its decadence (which he enjoyed and benefited from) and sin, just like his brothers on the right wing Christian extreme (like maybe Tim McVeigh, who was a Catholic to boot?).

As it stands, it seems that Walker can be interpreted as representing any number of ideological positions depending on where on the political spectrum you're shooting from. Perhaps it's a mistake to even apply such labels as "right-wing," or "liberal" to John Walker and the Taliban. After all, does anyone really care if Hitler was "right-wing" or "socialist" and do such labels matter? Of course not. Hitler and the Taliban are so far off the edge of the political spectrum as to be on another planet. They needed to be eliminated for the evil forces they were, not weighed and classified according to some ideological scale. Calling them right or left-wing is to insult genuine right and left-wingers who don't go around murdering Jews or imposing tyrannous theocracies.

Freud famously said that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," and the same applies to John Walker. To inflate him into something bigger than he really is, is to accord him an importance he doesn't deserve. He isn't symbolic of any greater moral rot in the heart of American society nor is he to be upheld as a representative of a wider political movement. John Walker is what he obviously was from the very beginning, a moral idiot and a traitor to his country, nothing more.

I've lived as a conservative in the shadow of Marin County for almost 30 years. California, especially northern California, is a bastion of liberalism. There are a few of us conservatives, but damn few. I won't take the time or space to debate why there are so many liberals in northern California, but there are--in both wealthy and poor areas.

Walker-Lindh is a symptom of that liberalism. He was much more likely to occur here than in Nebraska, because of local liberal and permissive attitudes.

I live on the occupied S.F. peninsula, and Joe is right. I disagree with the author, I think Walker is a symptom of the liberal socialist (to the point of communist) rot in Marin and other similar communities and the entire government of the State of California. He is unimportant in the fact that he was very ineffective in damaging the U.S. military effort. Fortunately it seems, he has damaged the left more.

Why should we turn John Walker into a symbol of anything at all? In their search for larger meaning, "commentators tend to overinflate the importance of things", so that single events or persons become symbols of larger trends in our society, even when those trends manifestly don't exist. ***********************************************************

"Gov't tends to overinflate the importance of things also, so you forget OBL" ..... it ain't goin to happen.. You're right, this could happen in any State!

First you are criticising the conservatives for flaming John Walker, and by virtue of association Marin and California, then balk at the point you made about a Freudian cigar. Sometime a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a traitor is driven by a liberal and obnoxious society. An uneducated traitor could be a moral idiot, but John is educated, and if you think about it, an uneducated moral idiot wouldn't be a very effective traitor. Reviewing definitions we should note that the word idiot means: one who is outcaste, alienated, or left out. Thus in truth he is idiotic, but only relative to liberally oversexed San Fransisco. Do you blame him? Sometimes the word cigar is not a pun about the penis, and sometimes people like John come out of the woodwork signaling to others that freedom and self respect are disassociated categories.

Freedom and respect are both important American virtues, but they are not necessarily related by nationalism. We like to say in the military, "two out of three ain't bad". Duty, Honor and Country...and two out of three ain't bad either. Respect is something we have for parents and elders. This helps the political machine operate smoothly. Nationalism sometimes doesn't help the family operate smoothly. One follows from the other, and not vice versa. That something to be considered before you light a fire and tie him to a stake. You have a written a very liberal article and disguised it as conservatism.

It either takes a village or it doesn't. Liberals can't have it both ways.

If you have that crappy book by Hillary on your shelf, then you have signed on to the socialist malarkey that a community is responsible for those it brings up. If that's how they go about their business, then the community's majority group shares responsibility for the behaviors of one of their own.

Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that parents are responsible for their children in THEIR communities. Therefore, in a liberal community, the social majority, parents and individual are all held responsible, while in conservative quarters the parents and individual are at fault for antisocial behavior.

Quite frankly, I am growing tired of all the emotional responses as to what we should do to this Johnny Walker Taliban wanna-be. Why is this so difficult? When he took up arms to fight for another country, he automatically became a non-citizen. Unless I'm mistaken, he was already living and fighting in Afghanistan before the world trade towers were hit. At that point, he was already a non-citizen of the USA. After the trade towers were hit/pentagon/plane gone down in Pennsylvania; he was still a non-citizen of the USA. Certainly what we are doing over there counts as a "state of war"(and rightfully so); however, we have not "officially" declared our military action through congress as a war. Regardless, Johnny Walker is still a non-citizen. He should be treated as any other Afghan soldier POW would be treated. Nothing more, nothing less.

To put all things in a nutshell or perspective with Freedom and Respect, do we really have that, for I would beg to ask the next question, who is right, the people who want to see this young man hung, the parent who loves their son and a Media and Gov't betwixt and between.

Do we silently love him for he fought and stood up for what he believed and wish we could do that even in the wake of our death and in the end who will wash their hands of what the majority wants.

A familiar and beutiful story, swayed, yes, but hasn't everyone been thinking man knows better than God within you.

Basically sound, because you can't indict a whole culture based on one bad example. If you do indict Northern California now, what do you say if some horrible crime is committed in your state? Does that make you and your way of life responsible for it? Lindh does fit into the whole California culture, but it's not beyond reason that someone like him might come out of Oklahoma or Alabama. After all, Clinton came out of Arkansas, not out of San Francisco or Los Angeles.

I can understand if people don't want to cut the liberals any slack on this. The presumption -- adequately grounded -- is that liberals won't allow them any passes when it comes to blame allocation. It's always presumed that some murder delegitimizes Wyoming, Nebraska or Texas, never that Daumer or Kaczynski or Berkowitz or McVeigh discredits Wisconsin or Illinois or Harvard or New York City or State.

But looking beyond politics and "us vs. them," this is just one random case in a nation of over 200 million people. Reporters parachuting into the hometown of a murder or traitor are always looking for some kind of "deep" content -- which all too often ends up holding the whole community responsible for the crimes of one person. Maybe the "deeper" answer is that it could have happened in one's own neighborhood.

"Try him for treason and every other charge he qualifies to be charged with."

I heartily agree, it will send a strong signal to any other "American" who thinks that it is OK to take up arms and fights against America and it's allies. Otherwise it smacks of injustice (rich kid terrorists who have homosexual lawyers for fathers walk, poor kid terrorists like the guy who blew up the federal building in OK die), racism, (white guy walks while the "poor black" Arab terrorists die or do heavy prison time) and a return to status quo O.J. justice.

Mr. Walker renounced his citizenship the moment he VOLUNTARILY joined the Taliban and Alquida and went to "camp in order to learn how to POISON, SHOOT, and BLOW UP Americans. He is a TRATOR who was involved in the riot in which a Federal agent was BITTEN and beaten to death. According to broadcasts appearing on CNN and elsewhere he heartily approves of the Taliban and their stated goals for the destruction of America along with the events of Sept. 11. If there is to be justice, he must be brought up on charges of TREASON and he must, after a fair trial suffer the consequences of his actions. He doesn't need a spanking, he doesn't need a reprimand, he needs the death penalty or if the government doesn't have the guts to do this, life in prison with NO POSSIBILITY OF EVER GETTING RELEASED. If they can't handle this then turn him over to the Northern Alliance. They know how to deal with foreign terrorists perpetrating crimes within their country.

Mr. Bush must be strong and the federal government needs to do the right thing. Otherwise it is "business as usual" and the terrorists WIN!

Dr. S

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