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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Conservatives who say that America-hating California relativism produced John Walker don't know what they're talking about -- literally.
Dec 11, 2001 | He "was critical of America as a land that exalted self above all else." Americans "were so busy pursuing their personal goals, he said, that they had no time for their families or communities." He "wanted a value system of absolutes."
These sentiments are boilerplate standards for fire-breathing American conservatives excoriating our spineless, Godless iniquity. As it happens, though, the words are from a Newsweek profile of John Walker -- the American youth who turned up, smudge-faced and battle-shaggy, among the Taliban fighters who staged a savage prison uprising in Northern Afghanistan.
Of the many strange paradoxes surrounding Walker's sad tale, this may be the strangest: It turns out that Walker's own, radical-Islam-fueled critique of U.S. liberalism dovetails perfectly with that of American pundits on the right who are now trying to use his story as an example of liberalism gone awry.
The case -- outlined most prominently by Shelby Steele in a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, but echoed on call-in talk shows and online forums -- goes like this: Walker was raised in hot-tub-bedecked Marin County, cradle of California alternative lifestyles, home to woo-woo wackiness, schools that emphasize America's sins and a permissive spirit that makes Dr. Spock look like a martinet. As his teenage spiritual quest veered deep into Islam, his well-to-do parents just smiled and said, "Yes, dear"; they even paid for him to study Arabic in Yemen, and stood by without intervening when he wandered first to a Pakistani madrasa and finally into the ranks of the Taliban. All this makes Walker, as one pundit on "The McLaughlin Group" put it, a "poster child for liberal alternative lifestyles gone bad."
That's no coincidence, Steele argues: Marin liberalism played an active part in Walker's odyssey from pristine suburbia to a filthy Mazar-e-Sharif basement. Walker "came out of a self-hating stream of American life" with roots in both Marin's "wispy relativism" and a broader "post-'60s cultural liberalism." "Fashionable relativism" taught Walker that "Islam is as good as the family Catholicism" and that "anti-Americanism" could be worn as a badge of sophistication. The book that first turned Walker on to Islam, according to his father, was "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." "White American guilt," Steele says, inspired Walker's "Malcolm-style conversion into a politicized, anti-American Islam that culminated in treason."
If Steele is right, and the forces of relativism, liberalism and "subversive, winking, countercultural hipness" that dominate American society are to blame for Walker's apostasy, then the hills should be positively crawling with Taliban fellow travelers. Funny, though: I read Malcolm X as a high school student in the 1970s, at an affluent New York City private school at the height of what we still call "The Me Decade" (though its materialism and self-absorption were eclipsed by each decade to follow). "Cultural relativism" was at least as prevalent then as it is today. Many millions of high school students have read Malcolm X since. Of those millions, Walker is one of what can only be a microscopic number of supposedly self-hating white Americans to be persuaded by Malcolm's story to convert to Islam. And he is almost certainly the only one to take up arms against his country.
Similarly, if Marin County permissiveness and "cultural liberalism" were the forces responsible for turning Walker into a Taliban fighter, then surely we'd have seen an active pro-Taliban movement recruiting on the slopes of Mount Tam -- a latter-day Abraham Lincoln brigade of American lefties embarking from Sausalito to fight for the Mullah in Kandahar.
Forget it. Walker, of course, is notable for his singularity, his sheer unique improbability. No one expected to find an American kid among the Taliban -- least of all among the diehard holdouts of a prison rebellion holed up for a hellish week. The U.S. today is more united behind its war effort than during any other conflict since the Second World War; in such times, Walker is sui generis -- a fascinating fluke, not a representative case.
For Steele and those who share his perspective, though, the opportunity to turn Walker into a poster child for the evils of relativism and liberalism is just too tempting. Let's rail against the liberal establishment that failed to give this kid a clear set of rules and beliefs! Let's string up his parents for failing to "just say no"! It's certainly easier than waiting for the facts, or trying to fathom what depths of alienation or anger could put a teenager on such a misbegotten trajectory.
