CULTURE WATCH - Free to Go Bad: John Walker Lindh, an American tragedy.(accused US citizen who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan)(Column)

An old college friend of mine, the son of two prominent psychiatrists, had a saying: "A shrink's kid is always nuts." There's something about knowing too much about human development that distorts the relationship between parent and child-something about the limitless patience and disarming acceptance of a trained, non-judgmental therapist that's just guaranteed to drive a kid bonkers. There is nothing more infuriating to the young than being understood, and nothing so disorienting as having every idiotic enthusiasm and newfound obsession supported and indulged by their parents. For the years between, say, 14 and 19, every kid is a terrorist and every parent a John Ashcroft. Or they should be.

John Walker Lindh, the young man who left Northern California to lose himself in the Islamic fundamentalist movement, got the first part right. By any definition, he qualifies as a terrorist. Along with his gun-toting support of the Taliban in Afghanistan, he is also reported to have trained as a terrorist at al-Qaeda camps-learning how to blow stuff up, how to send and receive code, and creepiest of all, how to look inconspicuous at airports.

The legal questions here are subtle and complicated. Did Walker give up his citizenship when he picked up his Taliban-issue rifle? Is he properly prosecuted by the new government of Afghanistan, or by us? If by us, should it be in a court of law, as a citizen, or in a military tribunal, as a terrorist? Where did he get the dough to fly off to Pakistan last year? When he walked into his house wearing a skullcap and dashiki at age 17, why didn't anyone knock him upside his head?

He isn't a shrink's kid, but he's awfully close. The product of divorced parents from Marin County, California (are there any other kind?), he was raised in the very crucible of cultural nuttiness at the absolute zenith of its pervasiveness. He is a child of hot tubs, massage therapy, cultural relativism, amicable divorce, racial guilt, vegan diets, Chardonnay anti-Americanism, and "Teach Peace" bumper stickers. He is the product of gray-bearded radical high-school history teachers, old Volvos, public radio, world beat music, women's bookstores, pita-wrap sandwiches, and clunky brown sandals. He is . . . well, you know who he is. He's a rich American kid from a rich American town who was raised to believe that every crazy idea and every loony impulse he ever had was valid, that all cultures are basically equal (except for ours, which is a good deal worse), and that America is a pretty bad place.

It is tempting to pin this all on the liberals. Liberals have a lot of things to answer for, of course, but I'm not sure that John Walker Lindh is one of them, except in the most elastic sense. After all, he rejected the feels-good-do-it vibe of his hometown for the austerity and self-denial of Islam. He was a very conservative teen, no sex, no drugs-talk about your "Just Say No"-who saw the world in a series of starkly defined choices. In a more conservative part of the country, with a greater fundamentalist-Christian presence, he might have been able to channel his energies into that religion, in which case he might have gone to Pakistan to convert them, and not the other way around. When he picked radical Islam as his faith, and the Taliban as his government of choice, he rejected all of the left-wing pieties of his upbringing and education. At least the Viet Cong sympathizers and Shining Path collaborators ...