The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [85]
“So, did you decide to go to the Men of God program?” was the first thing she said to me.
“Huh? What?” I said.
“The Men of God program,” she said flatly. “We passed out a sheet at the meeting.”
My mind raced. Men of God, right—the junior Promise Keepers–type deal for Cornerstone men. For anthropological reasons I wanted to go, but doubted I’d be able to, owing to an assignment in D.C. I was being packed off to.
“Um, I don’t think I can make it,” I said.
“I see,” she said, glaring.
We went into the chapel—Joshua’s Generation met in a small chapel on the Cornerstone grounds, much smaller than the basketball-stadium-sized sanctuary and about the size of a neighborhood church. It even had stained-glass windows to bring out the small-town feel, although the stained glass looked somehow too new. The four of us slid awkwardly into a pew, Janine first, then me, then the watching Rebecca, then her doofus husband, Brian.
The sermon began. In the previous times I’d seen him, Hagee the younger had seemed to follow the Bush model of political heredity, being both dumber and more vicious than his dad. This would be no exception.
He began slowly, asking the crowd if there was anyone here who was concerned about global warming and the environment. Stupidly, unconsciously, I raised my hand. Still not completely awake, I turned to look at Janine, smiled, and then actually saw my hand raised.
Fuck! I lowered it right away, but Rebecca caught me. Pastor Hagee then snorted and said something about being tired of being told that using nonrecyclable cans was destroying the world. I am not of the opinion that that is true, he said. Doesn’t sound right to me, he said. Then he mentioned the Oscars from the previous weekend, and the Oscar Al Gore received for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
He asked if anyone had seen the excellent speech by our former vice president, spitting the words “vice president” out like they were dead flesh. When the chapel filled with hisses, he plowed on. “I felt a need to rebut this individual,” he said, and proceeded to rail against Gore, the environment, and global warming for a half hour.
“These environmentalists,” he said, “they’re trying to tell you that somehow all of these terrible things are going to happen because of us. Something WE did.
“They want to tell you,” he went on, “that it was America that did something bad, because they want to be able to tell us what we did wrong and send us a bill for it. China burns coal like—they burn so much coal, like it was nothing. But it’s all America’s fault, of course. If you ask anybody who knows whether America is a polluter, they’ll tell you, America is the cleanest country there is.”
“Amen!” shouted the crowd.
“Now,” he said, “why do they want you to believe this? Because they want to control what you do. They want to control where you go, what countries you go to, what cars you drive. They want to use the environment as a way to control the world!”
“Amen!” I shouted.
“I’ll tell you what they want to do,” he said. “They want to use the environment to force America to reduce its population. And how do they want to do that? Through abortion.”
I was ready to cheer for that, too, except that I couldn’t figure out what the fuck he was talking about, so I kept my mouth shut. There were more Amens, though. Encouraged, the portly pastor now looked down at his pulpit and read from a bunch of paper sheets.
“Time magazine says that the Sierra Club and others met with environmental leaders in Brazil in 1992 to discuss