I don't know if anyone has read this article but I think is pertinent to
our discussion about DJ and why we are teaching what we teach in Rangers and
the importance of it. I'm not saying that I side with the authors commentary
however but the facts that are laid out are interesting.
Johnny Walker Red
Making Sense of America's Traitor
by Andrew
Sullivan
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.
December 16, 2001, The Sunday Times of
London.
copyright ) 2001 Andrew Sullivan
Bob Simons
For I know the plans I have for you," declares the
LORD,
"plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give
you hope
and a future. Jer. 29:11
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
