by Juan Cole
The culture wars kicked off by the 1960s are still with us. Indeed, much of the discourse of contemporary American conservatism can be boiled down to “damn liberal hippies ruined the country and they were wrong about x, y and z.” Fox Cable News and other conservative mouthpieces go to extraordinary lengths to badmouth the 1960s counterculture. They even blamed John Walker Lindh, the American member of the Taliban, on Bay Area culture.
But note that Lindh from his teenaged years was interested in the dry legal aspects of Islam, and rejected Sufi spirituality. Children of liberal parents become fundamentalists all the time (in fact, Rupert Murdoch’s media are attempting actively to produce that outcome). Lindh wasn’t warped by hippie liberalism– he rebuffed it, and might as well have rebuffed it for evangelicalism.
Steve Jobs, who died yesterday, combined in himself all the contradictions of the Sixties and of Bay Area experiments in consciousness. It seems to me entirely possible that the young Jobs would have joined the OccupyWallStreet.org protests.
He is a one-man response to the charge that the counterculture produced no lasting positive change. Jobs’s technological vision, rooted in a concern for how people use technology or could use it more intuitively, profoundly altered our world. He used to say that those who had never had anything to do with the counterculture had difficulty understanding his way of thinking.
Jobs was the biological son of Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali (a Syrian Muslim then graduate student in political science from Homs, which is now in revolt against the Baathist regime).
That is, like Barack Obama, Jobs was the son of a Muslim.
Simpson, young and unmarried, gave Jobs up for adoption, but she and Jandali later wed and gave Jobs a sister. He never appears to have met his father a political scientist who later went into the casino business, but he did get to know his half- biological sister Mona. That is, Jobs’s childhood was wrought up with a) Muslim immigration to the United States and b) the sexual revolution, both phenomena of the 1950s that accelerated in subsequent decades. Of course, these two parts of his heritage had only an indirect impact on him.
His adoptive parents were Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian Jobs (his adoptive mother would therefore be of Armenian heritage.)