the trendy people he grew up with might scoff. He even became a soldier.
In another context — say, if he had become a born-again Christian and joined up with rebels in Iraq — John Walker might be a conservative hero. Instead, since he went off to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, he and his parents are being used as a prime example of what’s wrong with liberals.
Walker, you see, grew up in affluent and left-leaning Marin County, Calif., which tells some conservatives everything they need to know. “He was prepared for this seduction not just by the wispy relativism of Marin County, but also by a much broader post-60s cultural liberalism that gave his every step toward treason a feel of authenticity and authority,” pronounced Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele.
The Wall Street Journal said Walker and CIA officer Johnny Michael Spann, who was killed in a riot at the prison where Walker was being held, came from “two Americas that don’t even speak the same language.” The Journal editors said they found Spann’s world “refreshingly unenlightened” compared to the squishy permissiveness that infects Walker’s hometown.
Critics on the right had a field day deriding Walker’s parents, who were found guilty of a variety of sins. The kid was named for John Lennon! He went to an alternative high school! His mother had an interest in Buddhism! They sent him money even after he fell in with Islamic zealots abroad!
And what do you think Dad had to say after his son was found carrying an AK-47 against his own country? “I don’t think John was doing anything wrong,” Frank Lindh offered, in words that seemed designed to evoke winces. “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.”
By my lights, that’s taking parental understanding a bit too far. But what is a father supposed to do when a child he has loved and cherished from birth goes astray, placing himself in mortal danger? Maybe there are some parents out there who would say, “Kill the traitor,” but not many.
Most parents, if one of their children faced possible execution for his crimes, would choose to support him rather than abandon him. That is not the same thing as excusing his conduct. If Lindh plans to castigate his son for his grossly repellent choices — and for all we know, he does — he can hardly be blamed for preferring to do it in a private family conversation rather than on “Good Morning America.”
The rush to blame Walker’s crimes on his free-thinking parents and his wealthy, liberal hometown is way too facile. Timothy McVeigh came from what conservatives might call a “refreshingly unenlightened” place — Pendleton, N.Y., a blue-collar town of 5,000 people near Buffalo. He was also an Army veteran who saw combat during the Gulf War. But I don’t recall any conservatives saying that something rotten in the culture of Pendleton or Ft. Riley, Kan., brought on the Oklahoma City bombing.
Likewise, Theodore Kaczynski grew up in the heavily Catholic, salt-of-the-earth Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, which is known as “The Village of Churches.” But when the Unabomber was finally caught, no one blamed his murderous attacks on the pervasiveness of Christianity and patriotism in his youthful surroundings.
Plenty of bad people have grown up in wealthy, permissive, liberal towns — and plenty have grown up in middle-class, authoritarian, conservative ones. Human nature is the same in both places, and neither environment guarantees good citizenship. If old-fashioned moral attitudes are more likely to provide a reliable check on our baser impulses, why is it that murder rates are higher in Bible-Belt states like Mississippi and Alabama than in more liberal locales? Why do mass school shootings typically take place in Norman Rockwell country instead of Cambridge or Berkeley?
As for judging the influence of Walker’s family, long-distance psychiatry is not terribly reliable. Maybe his parents did a poor job raising him, or maybe he was headed for trouble no matter what they did. Evil and stupidity are often hard to comprehend. Good parents can produce bad kids, just as bad parents can yield good kids. We shouldn’t assume that someone else, with a stronger backbone and clear rules, would have had any more success with Walker than his parents had.
Conservatives insist the Walker case proves that if you don’t raise children with traditional moral values, some of them will veer wildly out of control. They’re right, of course. But they neglect to mention that if you do raise children with traditional moral values, some of them will do exactly the same thing.
Some lessons we have learned
Monday, December 31, 2001
A year ago, Americans were still recovering from a profound trauma: an excruciatingly close and bitterly disputed presidential election. It had to be resolved by the courts after a five-week legal battle that left George W. Bush, who came in second in the popular vote, with the most tainted victory in our history.
Well, we thought that was a profound trauma. Viewed through the haze cast by certain events that took place one morning in September, the case of Bush vs. Gore now looks like a petty squabble of unprincipled partisans, not the momentous struggle between good and evil that advocates on either side claimed at the time. Today, if you asked people for a personal embodiment of evil, not many Americans would name George W. Bush or Al Gore. And I doubt one in 50 could identify David Boies, who last December was famous — really — as Gore’s attorney.
Living through a horror is not really something to be recommended. Legend has it that after former Treasury Secretary John Connally and his wife had to declare bankruptcy back in 1987, a friend assured Nellie that the experience would make her a better, stronger person. “I didn’t want to be better or stronger,” she replied. Champions of collective discipline think the war on terrorism will firm up our national character. But there was really nothing wrong with our national character, as our determined response to Sept. 11 makes clear.
Still, finding ourselves suddenly at war had the same useful effects that a brush with death can have: illuminating truths that were not apparent before, and sharpening our sense of what is important. The government has been forcefully reminded that of all the countless responsibilities it has assumed in recent decades, none can match the gravity of its first duty: protecting its citizens from foreign enemies. Next to that, providing a Medicare prescription drug benefit — one of the main issues of that long-ago 2000 presidential campaign — seems to fall short of being absolutely essential.
Our leaders in Washington have also learned that when war is truly necessary, Americans will support it with almost universal fervor and resolve. A handful of left-wing critics, it’s true, did us the favor of proving that they are incapable of speaking up for their country even when it is under attack. Many commentators expected that ordinary people would likewise turn against our action in Afghanistan if things didn’t go well, something that had happened in previous conflicts.
But this war was fundamentally different from every war Americans have been asked to support over the last half-century. We didn’t embark on it because someone said it was needed to deter communist aggression, or preserve our credibility abroad, or prevent dominoes from falling, or shore up NATO, or avert a humanitarian crisis in one place, or enhance stability in another. We embarked on it because someone killed thousands of our fellow citizens and had every intention of killing more.
Osama bin Laden no doubt learned a lot as well from the aftermath of the attacks. He saw us leave Lebanon and Somalia when we suffered some casualties. He watched us respond ineffectually when terrorists attacked American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, an American military installation in Saudi Arabia, and an American destroyer in Yemen. So he thought he could carry out horrendous massacres on U.S. soil and pay no price.
That turned out to be the biggest miscalculation since Sen. James Chesnut of South Carolina, ridiculing
