In years to come, when archaeologists are prowling through the ruins of our civilization and wondering how it all happened, I would offer this snapshot. Heres the history of Americas longest war in two anti-American losers, John Walker Lindh and Bowe Bergdahl, confused young men with a gaping hole at the heart of where their sense of identity should be, stumbling through the Hindu Kush trying to find themselves. In the fall of 2001, the first confused anti-American loser trying to find himself, John Walker Lindh was on the enemys side - and was tried, convicted and jailed for 20 years. In 2014, the last confused anti-American loser of the Afghan war, Bowe Bergdahl, was on our side - and was honored by the President with a family photo-op in the Rose Garden and declared by the laughably misnamed National Security Advisor Susan Rice, to have served the United States with honor and distinction. If nothing else, John Walker Lindh usefully nailed one of the self-serving myths peddled after the awesome intelligence failure of September 11th: awfully sorry we failed to see it coming, said the high-ranking suits, but its impossible to do any covert deep-cover stuff out in Afghanistan; these fellows are all cousins and brothers-in-law - a guy from Jersey would stick out like a lap-dancer in a burqa. As we now know, instead of being full of fearsome Pashtun warriors renowned down the centuries, the Omar/ Osama ranks were like a novelty Gap ad, Losers of Many Nations - misfit Saudis, Pakistanis, Brits and Californians. Anyone can walk in off the street and be assistant supervisor of the third-floor latrine in Tora Bora by nightfall. The only distinguishing feature about John Walker is that hes such an obvious compendium of clapped-out clichés from Americas Left Coast the wonder is the mullahs didnt automatically take him for a CIA plant. He comes from a bastion of well-heeled pothead progressivism, Californias affluent Marin County. Just north of San Francisco, Marin is the kind of place where Taleban are rare and Republicans are rarer, and your average hippy-turned-lawyer can stay true to his Sixties values. This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius: a lotta latte, a little dope, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and everyone likes feeling religious, or at least spiritual. Following the traditional Marin pattern, his parents divorced, his mother converted to Buddhism, and the children were taught Native American spirituality. John was sent to an alternative high school. (In the Bay Area, all the high schools are alternative. The problem for parents is trying to find any alternative to the alternative.) The set texts included The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and John liked it so much that, like the late Mr X, he decided to embrace Islam and change his name, to Sulayman. His parents, putting their foot down for what seems to be the first and last time, demanded the right to continue calling him John. They had, after all, gone to the trouble of naming him after one of the colossi of the age, John Lennon. To this, he consented. In return, they let him study at the Mill Valley Islamic Center. In 1998, after an awkward trip to their ancestral Ireland in which John trudged dutifully round the auld sod wearing his turban and white robes, Frank Lindh agreed to let his 17-year-old son spend a year in Yemen, on the next stage of his spiritual odyssey. He e-mailed home to say al-Qaedas attack on the USS Cole was justified - oh, and by the way he was off to enroll in a Pakistani madrassah. So Dad wired him a couple thousand bucks, which goes a long way in Bannu. Aside from a glowing school report from his imam, that was the last Mr Lindh heard from Junior until he turned up brandishing an AK47 and declaring his approval of the events of September 11th. Raised by peaceniks and Marinated in tolerance, he took up an AK47 in defense of misogynists and gay-bashers: thats not an internal contradiction, but the logical reductio of the lefts moral nullity. Cocooned in one of the most prosperous enclaves on the planet, he was taught everything - from Buddhism to Indian spirituality to Malcolm X - except what it means to be an American citizen. There is a difference between tolerance of other cultures and the moral void inhabited by the Lindhs. We can, in any case, guess the limits of Marin Countys much-vaunted tolerance. Imagine that the Marinated Muslim had instead announced that he was going to enlist in the Marines. Would Marilyn Walker have seen that as a valid part of his self-discovery? Or would she have got out her joss sticks and wailed, Oh, my God, where did we go wrong? [Bowe Bergdahl, the echo of John Walker Lindh, did enlist, which is one of the Bergdahl Mysteries – TAC.] steynonline/6394/finding-yourself-in-the-hindu-kush/I
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 16:48:29 +0000
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