A Wake-Up Call For Xenophobes, A Revival For The Avaricious
Freedom of speech. We all enjoy it. The Constitution guarantees it. The American Civil Liberties Union fights for it. Some hate groups abuse it.
Thanks to freedom of speech, the John Birch Society still flourishes in America. On Oct. 10, its active Spokane chapter sponsored a talk by Michael Coffman that I attended.
The group that supposedly brought Coffman here was TRIM, which stands for Tax Reduction IMmediately, as the KPBX Arts Calendar informed me. TRIM is a safe and innocuous way for the JBS to gain adherents to its causes. Who in Spokane would object to lower taxes?
Inside the Spokane Valley Doubletree Inn banquet room, the banner behind the podium showed me the real sponsor. But I did not feel duped. I had been forewarned about the company Michael Coffman keeps.
The subject of his talk was the global climate treaty and the attendant dangers of international environmentalism. Some 115 people listened closely for the entire two hours. Most had banqueted there. All were dressed well, ladies in furs and men in suits. Many were crowding retirement or already in its lap.
Oddly, from my perspective, but not so oddly when I remembered where I was, no members of the press were in attendance. Spokane County is the same place where presidential candidate Ralph Nader spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at Eastern Washington University last March and nary a journalist’s keyboard clicked.
The United Nations is trying to institute a “one-world government” by the year 2000, Coffman claimed. Reading Al Gore’s book proves it. Gore wants to make the “rescue of the global climate” into “the central organizing principle” of society. The Unabomber owned a dog-eared copy of the book. The shudders of dread in Coffman’s audience were almost palpable. Their guest spoke loudly, authoritatively, confirming their darkest fears. America, he implied, is run by human-haters who will not stop at murder.
Funny, when I read Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance,” I saw no revolutionary call to arms. Instead, I read a practical cultural analysis of our environmental crisis. Gore offered biblical arguments for ecological and agricultural responsibility based on the Christian concept of good stewardship.
The impending global warming treaty, Coffman cautioned, is a step toward U.N. seizure of American lands and assets! Pre-treaty negotiations were held in Bonn, Germany, and attended by 170 nations. If ratified, this treaty will hit America hard because our consumption rates outstrip those of other U.N. member nations.
He’s right about that last bit, I said to myself. Should we Americans pay more because we consume more? Coffman’s listeners were uninterested in such questions. They wondered instead when Russians would be pounding down their gates.
Like most “wise use” leaders, Coffman rouses sleepy xenophobes.
“This is a civilization-destroyer!” Coffman shouted. And President Clinton is behind the treaty, “not to protect the environment” but to implement a one-world government.
The crowd frowned. They were getting what they’d come for.
An elderly fellow jogged my elbow and grunted his disapproval. Environmental groups, particularly the Sierra Club, will be helping to implement the new global government. The resulting U.N. collective, a sort of “supra-national EPA,” will patrol the planet.
Raising his voice, Coffman warned, “The Sierra Club will be our representatives in the United Nations!”
I tried to imagine my tree-hugger cohorts commanding microphones and nameplates at the pinnacles of power in Geneva, in Montreal, in Bonn.
A “pantheistic belief system,” Coffman continued, underlies America’s problems. The best evidence is the Endangered Species Act, according to which people are less important than animals.
Jacques Cousteau is a prime example. Cousteau wanted to reduce human populations hugely. We can all be thankful now that he is dead.
Coffman works hard to protect Americans against such terrors. He lobbies senators. He initiates thousands of fax messages and phone calls, he proudly reported. One series of his blitzes can send “all the Senate phone lines into complete gridlock for five straight days.” The Senate is forced to beg him to “call off my dogs.”
Coffman and his company, Environmental Perspectives Inc., are cozy with the current Congress. Idaho Rep. Helen Chenoweth, “a very close friend,” has read Coffman’s book - which, coincidentally, was for sale at the back of the room - and she said it “changed her life” and taught her lots about “pagan spirituality.”
Conservationists, Coffman concluded, hate Christians. To learn more about this menace, we need to buy his book, videos and pamphlets. We need to work to understand the complexities of this dangerous conspiracy. For a fee, he will show us what we need.
Afterward, the moderator thanked Coffman and led the multitude in prayer. I bowed my head with them, blending in. The prayer beseeched the Lord to smite and subdue “the evil beast” of international environmentalism.
“The ‘control of nature,”’ said Rachel Carson, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”
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