Thanks to being home a lot more during these past few weeks, I’ve been listening to a lot of music and getting back into bands I haven’t listened to in years, as well as, completely new bands. As much as I want all of this to end, and soon, it has been a pretty fun experience, despite the turmoil it’s caused. One song in particular has stuck with me – “John Walker’s Blues” by Steve Earle off his album Jerusalem. For those of y’all who don’t remember, the song is about John Walker Lindh, an American (as in born and raised here, not an American by virtue of the 14th Amendment) who joined the Taliban and would later fight against the United States after Uncle Sam invaded Afghanistan following 9/11. The song paints a sympathetic portrait of Lindh, depicting him as more of a confused kid than anything else. The first few lines in particular caught my attention:
I’m just an American boy raised on MTV
And I’ve seen all the kids in the soda pop ads
But none of ’em looked like me
So I started lookin’ around for a light out of the dim
And the first thing I heard that made sense was the word
Of Muhammad, peace be upon him
And, truth be told, Earle is simply not wrong here, in many ways he is far more correct than leftists usually are. Of course, there is no excuse for Lindh’s actions, but if you ever wanted a posterchild for how hedonistic, multicultural liberalism produces a generation of lost, rootless children, John Walker Lindh is it. This is a guy raised in the very epicenter of this madness, Marin County, California. He is the son of a (western) Buddhist mother and a lapsed Catholic father, who would go on to forsake his fatherly duties to spend more time with his homosexual lover. As a young man, his mother drug him to go see Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in the name of multiculturalism, which would spark his interest in Islam. He was a child given every possible reason to hate the decadent, alienated circus that calls itself the “West.” And, that’s not even getting into the Howard Zinn style “history” his parents likely spoon-fed him. As Earle mentions later in the song:
If my daddy could see me now, chains around my feet
He don’t understand that sometimes a man
Has got to fight for what he believes
He was raised in a culture that valued nothing more than tolerance, truly the highest and only virtue of this society, and it left him empty inside. So, without any real guidance from his family, beyond avoiding anything that smelled of traditional Western values, he found something to give his life meaning. It would be something that would ask far more of him than neoliberal tolerance. And, he found it, but it ended up being one of the worst possible things imaginable.
There is a lesson to be learned from this for the traditional Right. Thanks to several generations being taught that honor, duty, and the Western tradition should be replaced with pleasure and materialism, we now have a generation of “lost boys.” Unfortunately, they are no longer just found in wealthy areas like Marin County, California. There is a generation of young white men that are being told and instructed that, by virtue of being born Caucasian, they are the enemies of mankind. In addition, they can be spared this label if they become a member of one of the Left’s victim groups or engage in self-hatred. I think this is a reason why we have seen such an uptick in young white men becoming “transgendered” – it’s a perverse form of self-defense. You’re left with a choice: either slice off your genitals, become a consuming soyboy, or remain a passive normie. If not, you’re off to the social ghetto for toxic masculinity and crimethought.
For the rest of these “lost boys,” they are looking for answers and they will eventually find them. The task before us, as nationalists that actually care for the wellbeing of our people, is to set a good example. In turn, they will find a set of answers that can lead to self-improvement and healthy lifestyles. If we do not set that example, they will find those answers still, but likely in a more dangerous and destructive place. Our aimless people could very easily find false guidance from someone who would encourage them to do something incredibly stupid for “the cause.” We simply cannot allow that to happen.
Listening to the song again, another horrifying thought entered my head. For the Left, which certainly controls the entertainment industry, the Dissident Right is even worse than an American who fought for the Taliban. The song was controversial when it came out, I can remember Earle going on television to defend himself. CMT even dedicated an episode of their show Controversies to it. However, it wasn’t a career killer. Earle has been cranking out about two albums a year since the song came out, and all of them charted. He’s kind of a one hit wonder in the same way Devo is a one hit wonder, while both have had very long careers and large fanbases, the general public can only name one of their songs (“Copperhead Road” for Earle and “Whip It” in Devo’s case).
Now, had Earle written a song about Dylann Roof and how his dysfunctional home life may have contributed to his heinous crimes (again, not making excuses for either), it would have likely been the last album he ever produced. Earle would have been railroaded and accused of racism and allying with white terrorism. For many on the Left, writing a song sympathetic to an American who fought alongside Islamic barbarism is more acceptable than writing a similar song for anyone on the Right. And, I’m not just talking about murderers here. Had Earle written a song about someone who was doxxed and had their life destroyed, I can’t imagine that going over much better. It is all the more reason why the Dissident Right must be extra careful; we are dealing with an enemy that thinks we are completely devoid of humanity.
My opinion of Roof is, more or less, similar to that of Lindh – both were young men corrupted by the emptiness of modernity. In Lindh’s case, it was dogmatic liberalism and failed parenting. For Roof, it was drug abuse, possibly mental illness, and a ton more. In the end, they chose a horribly destructive fate. The excesses of the Left produced a society of people like John Walker Lindh and Dylann Roof, miserable creations with no hope, no stability, and no genuine culture.
Our job, as traditional, Southern Christians, must be to stop as many men from going down this destructive path as possible and give them a better alternative. It’s either (a) self-improvement through a group of spiritually mature people leading them, or (b) soyboy self-hatred, transsexualism (or something else along those lines) with a helpin’ of modern despair, or (c) a prison sentence. Young men, by their very nature, want something to believe in. Today, this is largely no longer the case. We better provide that opportunity and alternative.
Deo Vindice.
-By Dixie Anon
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
Good article. I have a habit of referring back to R.L. Dabney – Women’s Rights Women – whenever these issues come up, as they so often do these days. To wit:
Who can, with honesty and a straight face, deny that this exact scenario has played itself out precisely as Dabney describes above? But, wait, there is more, even more to the point of what you wrote. Mr. Dabney:
I don’t think what you’ve written as concerns that latter point of Dabney’s is “making excuses” for the John Walker Linde’s or the Dylann Roofs of the world. We know that the vast majority of criminality in the U.S. and elsewhere is committed by persons raised (if “raised” is what one wants to call it) in dysfunctional, fatherless families (if “families” is what you want to call them). And, yes, I’m being a bit superfluous in that last sentence since a “fatherless family” is a dysfunctional family, by definition. But of course there are all manner of ways in which fatherlessness has come to manifest itself in our times. The Walmart shooter from Texas is a good case in point; his “father,” such that he is/was, actually lived in the home (in a separate wing) with his kids until the boy was 13 and he and the mother formalized their separation by divorce proceedings and his moving out of the home. But by his own account, the father was a self-absorbed drug-addled absentee during the entirety boy’s formative years, which left his career mom (and the glorified baby-sitters known as the public schools) to do the bulk of the child-rearing in his particular case. And we see how that worked out. Here’s Dabney again (same essay):
One need merely read the hostile comments that almost always appear under any articles here that remotely speak of Christianity in a positive light to know and understand that Dabney was perfectly right in foreseeing where this capitulation to “Women’s Rights Women” would all lead over time. These Mal-adjusted individuals have been deprived of a father in most cases, and as such a mother (a proper mother) too. A sane society, not bent on its own destruction, would end the so called “universal franchise” in general, and the vaunted female franchise in particular, today. And damn the immediate consequences (pussy hats rioting in the streets, and that sort of thing.).