CULTURE WATCH - Free to Go Bad: John Walker Lindh, an American tragedy - accused US citizen who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan - Column

National Review, Dec 31, 2001 by Rob Long

An old college friend of mine, the son of two prominent psychiatrists, had a saying: "A shrink's kid is always nuts." There's something about knowing too much about human development that distorts the relationship between parent and child-something about the limitless patience and disarming acceptance of a trained, non-judgmental therapist that's just guaranteed to drive a kid bonkers. There is nothing more infuriating to the young than being understood, and nothing so disorienting as having every idiotic enthusiasm and newfound obsession supported and indulged by their parents. For the years between, say, 14 and 19, every kid is a terrorist and every parent a John Ashcroft. Or they should be.

John Walker Lindh, the young man who left Northern California to lose himself in the Islamic fundamentalist movement, got the first part right. By any definition, he qualifies as a terrorist. Along with his gun-toting support of the Taliban in Afghanistan, he is also reported to have trained as a terrorist at al-Qaeda camps-learning how to blow stuff up, how to send and receive code, and creepiest of all, how to look inconspicuous at airports.

The legal questions here are subtle and complicated. Did Walker give up his citizenship when he picked up his Taliban-issue rifle? Is he properly prosecuted by the new government of Afghanistan, or by us? If by us, should it be in a court of law, as a citizen, or in a military tribunal, as a terrorist? Where did he get the dough to fly off to Pakistan last year? When he walked into his house wearing a skullcap and dashiki at age 17, why didn't anyone knock him upside his head?

He isn't a shrink's kid, but he's awfully close. The product of divorced parents from Marin County, California (are there any other kind?), he was raised in the very crucible of cultural nuttiness at the absolute zenith of its pervasiveness. He is a child of hot tubs, massage therapy, cultural relativism, amicable divorce, racial guilt, vegan diets, Chardonnay anti-Americanism, and "Teach Peace" bumper stickers. He is the product of gray-bearded radical high-school history teachers, old Volvos, public radio, world beat music, women's bookstores, pita-wrap sandwiches, and clunky brown sandals. He is . . . well, you know who he is. He's a rich American kid from a rich American town who was raised to believe that every crazy idea and every loony impulse he ever had was valid, that all cultures are basically equal (except for ours, which is a good deal worse), and that America is a pretty bad place.

It is tempting to pin this all on the liberals. Liberals have a lot of things to answer for, of course, but I'm not sure that John Walker Lindh is one of them, except in the most elastic sense. After all, he rejected the feels-good-do-it vibe of his hometown for the austerity and self-denial of Islam. He was a very conservative teen, no sex, no drugs-talk about your "Just Say No"-who saw the world in a series of starkly defined choices. In a more conservative part of the country, with a greater fundamentalist-Christian presence, he might have been able to channel his energies into that religion, in which case he might have gone to Pakistan to convert them, and not the other way around. When he picked radical Islam as his faith, and the Taliban as his government of choice, he rejected all of the left-wing pieties of his upbringing and education. At least the Viet Cong sympathizers and Shining Path collaborators of an earlier era of American Upper-Middle- Class Youth Dementia paid lip service to the liberal claptrap of the time. (You remember: peace, love, equality, yada, yada, yada.)

So we make a mistake when we load John Walker Lindh onto the backs of liberal liabilities. He's a product of the American soup-a few parts no-fault divorce, a few parts left-wing history teacher, a few parts intellectual laziness, a few parts nutty parenting, and a healthy pinch of rudderless adolescence. (And we also make a tactical mistake. Let's be realistic: The guy who has been sending anthrax to network anchors and Democratic senators is probably-in his mind, anyway-on our side. And when they catch him, the media will stick him to us like an American-flag lapel pin.)

But in an irony so rich it's almost impossible to grasp: Thousands of miles away, in a country few of us could have found easily on a map a few months ago, an American boy who is rich and went there to fight for a backward, murderous dictatorship is now being guarded by an American boy who is not, and who did not. It's the world as seen through the experiences of 20-year-old Americans. Some get lost among the choices and the freedoms of our prosperous and indulgent society. Some don't. Thank God we produce more of the latter-way more-than the former.

In a way, of course, the 20-year-old American prisoner and the 20-year- old American Marine guard were both looking for the same thing: discipline, belonging, becoming part of a larger enterprise, and-in their own way-service. And yet a boy from Marin County who proudly decides to join the Marines is probably considered a great deal more eccentric-and alarming-than a boy who dons a skullcap and heads off to Yemen.