New York Times/Op-Ed December 22, 2001 Totally Extreme Taliban By THOMAS FRANK
CHICAGO -- At first it looked as though the outbreak of a shooting war meant a cease-fire in our long-running culture war. Conservative pundits realized that berating the American public for its ungodly values was less than wise in a time of such overwhelming common feeling. But if there has ever been a national crisis in which liberals escaped being tagged with negativism, weakness or treason, I haven't heard of it. And with the capture in Afghanistan of John Walker, a Taliban soldier from the cushy liberal lair of Marin County, Calif., the present crisis is quickly returning to familiar form.
Armed with a backlash fable so perfect it writes itself, the outrage brigade is on the warpath: Named for John Lennon, the young Talib came from an affluent family that encouraged his spiritual questing. He liked hip-hop, chat rooms and Malcolm X and seems to have suffered from a compulsive craving for authenticity — a quality that he couldn't find in his white suburban surroundings but that he thought was abundant in distant reaches of the Muslim world.
All that's missing from John Walker's bio is a stint researching parliamentary procedure for Tom Daschle. But even without such direct evidence, the culture warriors have decided that Mr. Walker's doings are an obvious reflection of the treasonous tendencies of the "liberal elite" and have commenced offensive operations accordingly. Radio commentators decry Californian "permissiveness." The Weekly Standard has posted Mr. Walker's teenage hip-hop noodlings on its Web site as though these were profoundly embarrassing to the left. Shelby Steele suggested in The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Walker's path to the Taliban started with the 60's, "countercultural hipness," sneering intellectuals and "cultural liberalism."
We really don't know enough about John Walker to pin his deeds on anyone other than himself. But as long as we're passing out explosive bits of blame, we would do well to turn the spotlight on that other corner of American life where a band of impudent snobs, elected by no one, wax subversive and work to undermine the authority of parents, the sanctity of marriage and even the honor of the flag.
I refer, of course, to corporate America. After all, libertinism hasn't been the exclusive property of leftist hipsters for many years. Born in the 1980's, John Walker grew up in a time when American conformity was the lamentation not of pampered professors but of Madison Avenue and the cutting-edge management gurus.
It is from TV commercials for sneakers and S.U.V.'s that we learn of the horror of American sameness and the freedom and personal authenticity that await us when we fire up a Macintosh or zoom away in a Honda CR-V. Extremism in the pursuit of intensity, the ad men tell us, is no vice. John Walker's generation was encouraged to use "extreme" cordless drills, buy its Dodges from an extreme used car dealer and catch its trout with an extreme fishing rod. Just for them did ecstatic TV hipsters steer their sedans up Himalayan peaks in search of the phattest possible brand experience. Maybe the boy Talib is simply an attentive consumer, his ill-fated affair with extreme Islam merely a twisted continuation of his search for the weapons-grade authenticity promised him so many times by manufacturers of bell-bottom jeans and lemon-lime soda.
And if shallow, questing soul talk has an institutional home, it is management theory. This is where you go to find impassioned stories about becoming a "change agent," searching earnestly for the true identity of a brand or devoting yourself to a "corporate holy man."
All that our culture warriors claim to deplore can be found in fashionable corporate literature: the relativism, the affected reverence for the wisdom of the East, the denunciation of old white males. Had the world not changed on Sept. 11, the teenage Talib might have anticipated a career back in Marin, schooling au diences made up of his middle-class homies in the leadership secrets of Mullah Omar.
Thomas Frank is author of "One Market Under God" and editor of The Baffler, a political and literary journal.