A Reflection on Patriotism and Related Matters

[eisely]

The following lengthy essay is by Andrew Sullivan and talks about John Walker Lindh and Johnny Spann. It should be pointed out that the writer is a rarity, an out of the closet homosexual is a political conservative. I mention this because one of the things that has NOT been reported by the PC press is that John Walker Lindh's father moved out of the family home in 1996 to take up housekeeping with his male lover. That was the year that the young man went astray. Could there possibly be a connection between a screwed up home life and this young man's oddysey into hell?

 

Sullivan, needless to say, disagrees with the BSA policy on membership for "avowed homosexuals." That fact does not limit the usefulness of Sullivan's insights on other issues and his skill as a writer. I don't know if Sullivan was aware of the events in 1996 when he wrote this. The sexual preferences of the father were reported locally at about the time that this piece was written.

 

Anyway, I digress. The point of this essay is not sexual orientation or practices, but the lack of belief.

 

__________

 

Johnny Walker Red

 

Making Sense of America's Traitor

 

If Hollywood had dreamed it up, the critics would have dismissed it as absurdly far-fetched.

 

Two young Americans; two soldiers. One a hero; the other a traitor. One from the heart of small town conservatism; the other from the most renowned enclave of liberal relativism. One fought for the CIA; the other battled for the Taliban. And then, in one cinematic scene, they meet. In a fort in a wasteland, the two men confronted each other: the two Americas face-to-face; and one of them is killed. Could you make this stuff up? Only Francis Ford Coppola could do it justice.

 

Americans are just beginning to grapple with the extraordinary story of John Walker Lindh from Marin County, California and Johnny Spann from Alabama. Not so long ago, the press was full of analysis of an evenly divided country exposed so starkly in the last election: the vast swath of Republican America in the center of the country and the more liberal and cosmopolitan coasts and big cities. Before the red, white and blue of the terrorism war there was the red and blue of the culture war. The story of Walker and Spann is in some ways a story of both - of the interplay of patriotism and culture, faith and fate.

 

Johnny Spann grew up, according to the New York Times, in a tiny town with four stop-lights in the heart of God-fearing Alabama. No alcohol was sold there; the nearest cinema is 30 miles away. His school teacher remembers Spann's kindness: he gave a shoelace to a friend who had broken his. Spann brought apples for the teacher. He was not a huge guy, but nevertheless a dedicated player on the school football team. Each Sunday, he would pray in the local Church of Christ, one of the most extreme of the fundamentalist Christian churches in America. In his high-school yearbook, when asked to place a quote by his name and picture, Spann chose a passage from the Bible. It was from Proverbs: "He that waketh with wise men shall be wise; but a companion of fools shall be destroyed."

 

Spann went to college at a small school and married a young woman who grew up ten miles from his hometown. Several months before he graduated, he joined the Marine Corps Reserve, finally joining the Marines as soon as he left university - going to the officers' training school in Quantico, Virginia. He rose swiftly through the ranks, becoming a captain in 1996. The New York Times interviewed his fellow Marines about him. "He was a tough guy among tough guys," said one. "He didn't slack off - ever," said another. "You never saw him unkempt. I don't know that I ever saw him drink. I always thought he was raised by a preacher." Before long, Spann was eager to move on and joined the CIA in a paramilitary unit. Friends remembered him as serious, almost pious - seeing the world in the clear, moral hues of his native town. "I believe in the meaning of honor and integrity, constantly pursuing them personally and professionally," Spann wrote in his personal statement in his C.I.A. application, according to the Times. "Although I sometimes fall short, I guide myself by asking, `Is it the right thing to do?' I am an action person that feels personally responsible for making any changes in this world that are in my power. Because if I don't, no one else will."

 

On the other side of the continent, another young man was growing up in the same country but a completely different world. John Walker Lindh grew up in Marin County, California, perhaps the most celebrated region of West Coast alternative lifestyles. The classic tome that etched the region in the American consciousness was a book called "The Serial: A Year In the Life of Marin County." It was published in 1980, just before Walker was born. Think of Islington with Redwood forests. Here's how George Will described the place two decades ago: "Moderns in Marin try to live down their mothers back in Spokane ("I mean, she makes casseroles"), make up bumper-stickers for their Volvos ("Another Glass-blower for Udall"), attach tiny silver coke spoons to their high school charm bracelets, drink at "The Silenced Minority," buy Earth shoes at "The Electric Poppy," and get hair cuts at "Rape of the Locks," where a black militant shampooer harasses the ladies by constantly changing the soul handshake. Marin's affliction is "French bread thumb," a wound suffered by hostesses who drink too much with hors d'oeuvres and then slice themselves instead of the bread. Main exercises include Zen jogging, and dressing for tennis." Get the picture?

 

Walker's parents were Catholic but encouraged him to find his own spiritual pathway. Named after John Lennon, he had to Imagine his own faith. He dabbled in Buddhism, and became enamored of hip-hop. Like many a liberal white American adolescent, black culture seemed an authentic way to rebel against the society that had spawned him. He tried on many guises, chatting on the Internet under a variety of screennames, from John Lindh, John Doe, and Disciple of the Englober, to Hine E Craque, Professor J, Brother Suleyman Al-Mujahid and Mr Mujahid, among others. Sometimes his postings seemed to have internalized an entirely different identity. In 1995, while Johnny Spann was signing up for the Marines, Johnny Walker was pretending to be black: ""When I read those rhymes of yours I got the idea you were a 13-year-old white kid playing smart," he berated one poor rapper. "That whole rhyme was saying all black people should just stop being black and that'll solve all our problems. Our blackness does not make white people hate us, it is their racism that causes the hate."

 

Like many adolescents, Walker found that the "Autobiography of Malcolm X" was written for him. He went from someone who once rejected the strictness of the Catholic Church to someone who seized on the most austere form of Islam for some kind of personal transformation. Soon he was out-doing most American Muslims in his suspicion of Western culture. "It seems quite unusual to have a Muslim convention at a theme park owned by Disney, whose producers are full of kaffir mythology, magic, occultism, sexism, racism and homosexuality. Isn't this the same theme park that sponsored 'gay day' this year?" Read that sentence one more time. It's a weird confluence of leftist victimology and rightist cultural paranoia. It's a useful reminder that ideology is less a straight line than a circle. At some point the extremes of left and right meet. Walker found that place and united the liberal loathing of the West with the conservative loathing of modern permissivism. Islam was where the extremes touched.

 

Reading about Walker's story, it seems at times like some kind of dark version of Absolutely Fabulous. His hyper-liberal parents wanted nothing more than that their son rebel, seek his own way, find his own path. Walker faced the dilemma of every rebellious child of liberal parents: how do you really rebel? AbFab's Saffy finds a kind of rebellion in conformity. Walker did the same, attracted by the stern strictures of Islam, but also finding its exoticism almost approved of in his cultural milieu. Radical Islam squared his adolescent circle. No-one judged. No-one told him that his subsequent beliefs in the subordination of women, the execution of homosexuals, the mass murder of innocents in a Jihad were actually "wrong." In liberal enclaves in California, there is no actual right and wrong. There is only judgment (abhorrent) and tolerance (admirable). Even now, when Walker has supported an army that killed thousands of innocents, some Californians are reluctant to "judge." "As a friend and as a person who cares for Suleyman, I hope he can come back to his friends and family. Whether he has done something wrong is not for me to say," an attendant at Walker's old mosque said last week, using Walker's adopted Muslim name. "Really, God determines. God will judge a person's actions in the hereafter."

 

Encouraged by his doting parents, Walker subsequently dropped out of school, and traveled abroad to the Yemen, because the dialect there is apparently closest to the original language of the Koran. Walker stayed apart from others, devoting himself almost manically to learning every word of the Koran, but growing increasingly uncomfortable with the heat and dust. After a trip back home in 1999 to see his mother, he returned and eventually found his way to Afghanistan. Recruited into the holy war that was a logical extension of his extreme religious fervor, Walker had slowly morphed into something that Norman Mailer described many years ago: he became a White Negro. The anti-Western self-hatred of the cultural far left flipped the young man's identity inside out. The doubts and choices of a permissive environment were resolved by the absolute certainty of a medieval faith in its most stringent form.

 

Johnny Spann had never lacked such certainty, he had grown up with it, He felt it in his bones. Just before he left for Afghanistan, he had emailed his parents the following message: "What everyone needs to understand is these fellows hate you. They hate you because you are an American. Support your government and your military, especially when the bodies start coming home." Like Walker, he also ended up thousands of miles from home, but he was in the service of his own country, not an alien fanaticism. Spann meanwhile had morphed slightly out of the rock-ribbed identity of his early life. He was divorced from his first wife, with whom he had had two children. His new wife had just given birth to his third child. It's unclear exactly what Spann had been doing in the war up until his last moments. But on a fateful day, he was in a fort near Mazar e Sharif, interrogating Taliban prisoners.

 

In an amazing turn of events, Spann's final actions were actually videotaped. On the ground in front of him were several prisoners of war, disheveled beyond belief, filthy, malnourished, and silent. One of these prisoners turned out to be Walker. Spann squatted down to face his fellow countryman: "Who brought you here? Wake up! Who brought you here to Afghanistan? How did you get here?" No reply comes. Walker had no epiphany after American troops and Northern Alliance forces had routed the Taliban in Northern Afghanistan. He seemed to regret nothing, to remain adamantly devoted to his new cause and new loyalty.

 

Spann and his CIA colleague, "Dave," then talked loudly in front of Walker to try and goad him into some kind of response. "The problem is," Dave said, "he needs to decide if he wants to live or die ... We're just going to leave him, and he's going to f-king sit in prison the rest of his f-king short life. It's his decision, man." Spann tried another tack. "There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City. Is that what the Quran teaches? I don't think so. Are you going to talk to us?" Walker sat mute.

 

What happened next is unclear. "Someone either pulled a knife or threw a grenade at the guards or got their guns, and started shooting," Walker told Newsweek last week. "As soon as I heard the shooting and screaming, I jumped up and ran about one or two meters, and was shot in the leg." Spann wasn't so lucky. Apparently, a Taliban soldier with explosives strapped to his chest ran up to Spann, hugged him and detonated. Spann became the first American casualty at the hands of the enemy in the entire war. He was buried in Arlington cemetery, a place he had once spent many hours walking in, surrounded by military heroes of decades and centuries past. The picture of his young widow on the front page of the New York Times last week was unforgettable. She is cradling their infant and staring at the coffin, held aloft by marines, draped in Old Glory. Her eyes bespeak the deepest grief but also an almost incandescent anger. She is not alone.

 

At some level, the tale of these two Americans is simply an anomaly. Comparatively few soldiers have seen the kind of direct combat that Spann grappled with. So far, Walker is the only active traitor in Taliban ranks that we know of. In some respects, their meeting was simply a spectacular coincidence. But it is so laden with cultural and political significance, it is hard to avoid considering its broader meaning. If you had wanted to construct the most egregious stereotypes of the conservative, God-fearing military hero and the liberal hippy traitor, it would be hard to beat Spann and Walker. Their backgrounds evoke visceral responses among Americans, suggestive of a culture war that might have happened if this war had gone badly or never been aggressively prosecuted in the first place.

 

Was this an epic meeting of red and blue America? Some have already leaped to that conclusion. The writer Shelby Steele wrote eloquently in the Wall Street Journal last week that "Cultural liberalism serves up American self-hate to the young as idealism. And this idealism, along with the myth of the victim-sage, was the context of Walker's young life. It's too much to say that treason is a rite of passage in this context. But that is exactly how it turned out for Walker. In radical Islam he found both the victim's authority and the hatred of America that had been held out to him as marks of authenticity. He liked what he found. And when he turned on his country to be secure in his new faith, he followed a logic that was a part of his country's culture." This is a brutal but powerful judgment. What Steele argues is that the cultural liberalism of some parts of America was a necessary condition for Walker's treachery. It may not have been sufficient; it certainly cannot explain everything. But Walker's own sad young life is an obvious testimony to how lost some young souls can get in a culture where nothing is deemed sacred, nothing right, nothing wrong, and everything equally true.

 

The left sees otherwise. If this culture spawns treason, they ask, where are the other traitors? Do we blame Alger Hiss's upper class WASP background for his treason during the Cold War? Do we infer that being Jewish had something to do with the disloyalty of the Rosenbergs? Was Ezra Pound's treason a function of his upbringing in Idaho? Just because so many British traitors turned out to be gay, does that mean that homosexuality itself is inherently prone to disloyalty and betrayal? These points surely have merit. It's far too easy to extrapolate wildly from someone's background to damn everyone around him or her by association. It's also true that Marin County isn't quite the liberal stereotype of lore. Go there today and the place is festooned with flags, like many another American suburb. "He gave us up, he gave up on his country," said a Marin County gourmet grocer to the Las Vegas Sun last week. The man wanted Walker exiled. "I think the young man's pretty much doomed. There's no way his parents could save him from this." Sixty percent of respondents on the website of the San Francisco Chronicle believed Walker should be executed. And that's the mood in San Francisco - not Mississippi.

 

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen, perhaps sensing a devastating indictment of a liberalism he is sometimes in sympathy with, appealed to other boomer parents: "Behind the beard and the filth, almost any parent recognizes John Walker. He is the kid who is possible, not probable, who could be yours but probably is someone else's, who would be loved but not liked or understood. He is not the predictable consequence of relativism, liberalism and balmy weather but an exception to almost any rule you can think of -- except, of course, the tendency to always fix blame no matter what." One Marin County writer made a similar point: "I have no idea if Northern California parents are more lenient. All of the people I'm close to are liberal Democrats, and most of them have fantastic children. But some of their kids have ended up in the street or as suicides. I bet that statistically hard- core right-wing Christians have about the same proportion of happy and well-adjusted children as us aging progressives." And indeed, murder rates are higher in the Bible belt. And bad apples come from every family. One esteemed Texas family once had a highly volatile youngster who drank a lot, crashed cars and wasted his life away. He's now president of the United States, a man whose own experience perhaps led him to compassionately describe Walker as a "poor fellow."

 

And yet at the same time, it's still not surprising that a man of Walker's odd life-history came from the relativist, liberal enclaves of the American upper middle class. In the last week, his father still couldn't bring himself to condemn the actions of his son - a man complicit in an army that kills thousands of non-combatant innocents. "I don't think John was doing anything wrong," he told CBS's "The Early Show." To ABC's "Good Morning America" he said, "We want to give him a big hug and then a little kick in the butt for not telling us what he was up to." Not telling us what he was up to? If his father cannot even have an inkling of a moral compass after this event, what chance did his son have growing up?

 

The truth is, parts of the American left have long lost faith in America. They don't believe in her; or they fashion their patriotism in such contravention of American history, traditions and ideals that it is scarcely recognizable as patriotism to many of their fellow Americans. For these people, the whole notion of "treason" is anathema, because its opposite - an undying loyalty to country - is so suspect. "I strongly believe in this sort of citizen-of-the-world notion," a Marin resident told the press last week, in defense of Walker's upbringing. The liberal elites who lost their nerve for good during the Vietnam War are too old to regain it now. The soft-left spin now is that these people don't really exist - that they are a figment of the paranoid Right's imagination. But of course they exist. You only have to hang among the faculty at a major American university and you will find before too long a visceral disdain for traditional American values, a skepticism of the very notion of freedom, a deconstructed ideology that, confronted with evil or an enemy, can only see nuance and certainly can never find the will to fight. This decadence flared briefly in the wake of September 11. If the war had gone badly, it would be gaining strength right now. And these people and their apologists will find in Walker such a monumental embarrassment that they will do everything they can to make sure his story is forgotten, ignored or trivialized.

 

But it won't be. Much of the country knows instinctively the kind of mindset that makes a John Walker possible. Besides, the left is in a very difficult position arguing that it is wrong to blame an entire subculture for the actions of a tiny few. For years now, they have used the example of Timothy McVeigh to indict any anti-government Republican from the heartland. Yes, guilt by association is wrong and unfair. But context tells you something. And what the story of John Walker and John Spann tells us is that for all the disdain and condescension that is often leveled at small town conservative America, it's the men and women from those places who often make it possible for the rest of us to live in peace and security.

 

Americans won't press the point now. The argument is far too divisive and rancorous to gain traction in the middle of a war. But my guess is that we are witnessing a deep and profound cultural shift in the United States. The post-Vietnam liberalism that swept through an entire generation, the cultural liberalism that despised Nixon and sustained Clinton, is in a profound and perhaps irreversible retreat. And one reason is that in the story of John Spann and John Walker, an obvious truth was revealed. We all need a sense of right and wrong - from childhood onwards. And patriotism, that atavistic, powerful, but beleaguered sentiment, is a function neither of weak minds nor feeble prejudice. Sometimes, it is a surpassing virtue, and its opposite a vain and callow evil.

 

 

Sunday Times of London, December 17, 2001

 

[Dedicated Dad]

John Walker Lindh's father moved out of the family home in 1996 to take up housekeeping with his male lover. That was the year that the young man went astray. Could there possibly be a connectionI happen to know first hand, though anecdotally, that there is a connection. This has happened twice to two different relatives in my near family and its the children who have suffered the most. This kind of dysfunctional environment easily challenges ones faith and the practice perversion by ones parent ranks among the most flagitious and insidious threats to their childrens well being. an out of the closet homosexual is a political conservativeWith all due respect, he might be Liberaltarian (fiscally conservative and socially liberal) but calling him a conservative is as repugnant to its definition as (insert favorite simile here).

 

 

[evmori]

eisely,

Thanks for the post. What a story! I think execution is teh wrong punishment. He deserted his country, so his country should revoke his citizenship.

 

Ed Mori

Scoutmaster

Troop 1

 

"I'm Proud to be an American,"

"Where at least I know I'm free"

"And I won't forget the men who died,"

"And gave that right to me"

"Cause I'd gladly stand up next to you"

"And defend Her still today."

"Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land"

"God bless the USA"

[OldGreyEagle]

I have heard Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American" many times. At this years national Jamboree it was the finale being played full volume during a spectacular ground shaking fireworks display. As I looked across the field I saw thousands of scouts and scouters singing and enjoying the show. I sang along, it was easy, fun and light. After Sept 11th, I again heard the song, this time singing along was a lot harder (tough to sing with tears in your eyes) and the words had greater poignancy than ever before.

 

 

[evmori]

OGE,

My district uses 'God Bless the USA' as part of the opening ceremony. I used it for my son's Eagle Court of Honor. We have a slide show that goes with it. I have never been able to keep a dry eye form the 1st time I heard it.

 

Ed Mori

Scoutmaster

Troop 1