Richard Mauer's account of Marti Cox's exchange with reporters Thursday is excellent. As a columnist, I just want to add a few things.
Marti Cox was incredibly poised as she talked about the militia trial, her beliefs, her husband and her two children. She is not a practiced public speaker like her husband and took great care to express herself clearly and precisely. This made her seem at some points hesitant, but from what I saw, she answered all the reporters' questions except one. She wouldn't comment on the domestic violence charge that brought her husband into court for the first time.
Marti is a tall, trim woman with longish straight hair and big glasses. She frequently talked with her hands, making large gestures. She seemed to wonder if she could trust the reporters to (1) understand her fully and (2) treat her family fairly. She impressed me as a lovely young woman caught up in powerful events not of her own making that have changed her life forever. She didn't seem to have an ounce of guile.
She wasn't angry, never raised her voice, but was predictably critical of the government, and certainly was vivid when she said the government's major achievement with this trial is the creation of a "widow and two orphans." She said the government could make anybody look terrible by splicing together small pieces of their lives.
She described her husband as being very gifted since he was very young. He has been capable of seeing things other people can't see, of employing logic other people don't have, of making connections other people can't make. Asked if she would advise her husband to leave politics if acquitted she paused before saying, "Political participation can take many forms."
Marti's philosophizing on the difference between God's law and man's law was disjointed. I think she was telling us God provides eternal verities, man provides rules to live by, and Schaeffer Cox knows the difference between the two and which has priority.
When Marti began speaking to reporters, the lawyers in the case were re-inventorying the exhibits submitted in court. The evidence included all kinds of rifles and other weapons that were rolled into the room on carts. Some were in boxes, some not. It was not unusual to find God and firearms in close proximity at this trial. Defendant Coleman Barney was asked if he would buy an illegal firearm if he really believed the end times - God's judgment - had arrived. He answered no, presumably to emphasize his law-abiding nature even in cosmic circumstances.
As a philosopher, the Schaeffer Cox presented at trial was an intellectual mess. Eclectic yes. We heard about Moses, the Founding Fathers, Howard Stern, Glenn Beck and John Locke, whom Cox absurdly described as "French." But there was no intellectual rigor to his meandering thoughts and words, and his recorded speeches - with their condemnation of the income tax and President Woodrow Wilson for instituting it - were nothing more than traditional prairie populism. As a political thinker, Cox is trite.
An old friend of mine has the habit of cautioning me, "Remember, Michael, nobody is the same person 24 hours a day." He's right, and I know he's right from personal experience. The Schaeffer Cox that Marti Cox talked about - her husband - is not the man in the indictment or the man portrayed by witnesses and captured on government audio and video tape. But if Schaeffer Cox really can see things other people can't see, he should have seen what lay ahead for him, put down his weapons, and returned to his wife and children.
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Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com
By MICHAEL CAREY
Anchorage Daily News