It’s been downhill as commercials and commercialism have become ubiquitous, cacophonous, intrusive, and overbear-ing. Major corporate advertisers assert their "right" to assault us anywhere and everywhere, even attempting to redefine the American people’s identity. No longer are we treated as citizens, or even as broad shouldered workers but as slump shouldered shoppers. Are you depressed? Go shop-ping. Is there a war? Go shopping. Do you love someone? Go shopping. Do you love someone a lot? Go shopping a lot. Is it Labor Day, Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Jr’s. birthday, or any of those other "Monday" holidays? Go shopping. Is the economy crashing? Go shopping. Are consumer debt and bankruptcies at an all-time high? Go shopping. Did some rooster somewhere crow at sunrise this morning? Go shopping. They’ve given our nation a bold new slogan as we surge into the twenty first century:

"America We Buy Stuff!"

The only problem that the crass commercializers have is that you blankety blanks keep messing it up for them. Yeah, you — you brats and pushy parents who have been winning local fights from Nashville to Seattle to throw "Channel One" out of the schools, stunting this corporate effort to turn classrooms into captive audiences for ads; and you — you prissy citizens of New York City who forced Microsoft to come out and clean off the sidewalks and trash cans that it had splattered with ads for one of its products without bothering with such niceties as asking anyone’s permission to litter the public walkways; and you you aging flower children in San Francisco who persuaded the wimpy board of supervisors to return the name of Candlestick Park to (we hate this) Candlestick Park instead of reselling the name to 3Com or some other corporation with a nondescript and stupid name; and you — you creeps in Boston who are so stuck in yesterday that you killed the governor’s effort to sell the names of four of the city’s main subway stations to corpora-tions hey, the "Hooters Back Bay Subway Station" would’ve added a little pizzazz to the town; and you - you weenies in Texas and California and elsewhere who’ve banned the sale of junk food and soda in your elementary and middle schools are you not aware that Twinkies and Moun-tain Dew are a perfectly balanced combo of sugars and fats, plus being loaded with Vitamin Q? Despite the establishment’s best efforts to reduce us to consumer cogs in the perpetual work buy work die merry go round, we people of the USA have a deeper, more spiritual sense of ourselves, our fami-lies . . . and our communities. About here some of you might be mumbling to yourself, or even saying out loud:

Hightower, now you’ve rowed your little boat right onto the shoals of wishful thinking. Don’t you know that average people in this country are so slow that their lips move when they read stop signs, don’t you know that we’re such suckers that we’ve bought a jillion of those Big Mouth Billy Bass thingies advertised on latenight TV (a singing fish you hang on your wall, for chrissake), don’t you know that people are such sheep that they’ll flockbaaaaaaaato McDonald’s and Starbucks and Gomer Pyle’s Fried Pigknuckles without any thought about local identity or a community’s soul? Well, I know that that’s the image the Powers That Be have of us and constantly seek to reinforce. (A QUICK ASIDE: Dick Armey, the exRepublican leader and well-known mental giant, made a fine contribution to this denigration of We the People when he offered this keen insight last year: "Liberals are, in my estimation, just not bright people. They don’t think deeply, they don’t comprehend, they don’t understand a partial derivative." Ohhh, that is deep, Dick. Of course those who do fully understand a partial derivative have names like Ken Lay and Andy Fastow of Enron infamy. We’ll get back to you, Dick, when we need another of your laser sharp sociological observations. Until then,

stay under your log. NOW BACK TO THE NARRATIVE.) The Powers That Be would have you believe that average Americans are well below average, shallow, and don’t give a damn about anything but their next Big Mac, so it’s useless to try to talk to them, much less organize them to battle the McWorld that is America’s happy future. Revolt is futile . . . go with the flow . . . enjoy . . . go shopping. I find a very different America, filled with rebellious, ingenious people who care a lot around them and are not meekly submitting. The national media conglomerates (which routinely put every local badnews story on the air and hype it to hell and back: "Horror in a West Virginia Town;" "A Brutal Death in a Los Angeles Neighborhood," "People in British Village Watch Gruesome Murder") ignore the remarkable, everyday stories of people standing up so beautifully in their neighborhoods and towns probably where you live, too.

Yes, thank you, I would. Last year, for example, on a single trip up to Washington state, I came across four beauties. I’ve already related one of them to you the Stevens County victory and I’ll tell you about another one involving Fair Trade Apples later in the book. Here are the other two.

The Seven Day War for the Soul of Chelan

This was less of an organized campaign than a case of spontaneous civic combus-tion exploding in the face of both the city council and a very large fast-food conglomerate famous for thrusting its garish yellow arches into every neighborhood and town on the globe . . . except for Chelan.

It’s been my joy to visit this small resort city on the edge of Stormy Mountain, not far from the Grand Coulee Dam. When I say "resort;’ put away your image of posh getaways, dazzling casinos, or the plastic Disney imitations of reality. Chelan is reality a beautiful location on Lake Chelan with several low rise hotels that cater to tens of thousands of working-class folks who flock here with their families each year, enjoying the water sports, games, restaurants, scen-ery, and laid-back fun of one of the great little spots on our earth. It’s a chain-free town‚ no chain hotels, restaurants, or other franchise intrusions here.

A favorite place for locals and tourists alike is Lakeview Drive-in, a superb burger joint that’s right out ofAmerican Graffiti. Situated smack in the center of things on a jut of parkland overlooking the lake, this drive-in is a jewel. The city owns the land and building, and for forty-five years the place has been leased to locals, most recently the Michael Mack family, which has been turning out classic drive-in grub and shakes for twenty years.

Then came August 15, 2002. At a Chelan council meeting, it was revealed that the city was in the final stages of secret negotiations to oust Mom and Pop from the Lakeview and turn the primo location over to: McDonald’s. Won’t this be great, thought the majority of council members not only will we get credit for bringing the golden arches to town, but taxpayers will love us, too, since McDonald’s came in here waving money, offering to sign a twenty-year lease at above the 20K the Mack family has been paying.

"Is the council stupid, or just nuts?"

one of the first and gentlest of the $36,500 a year way was letters, emails, and phone calls that deluged city hall and the media. A Seattle Times columnist ran a piece about the council’s deal with the devil, and he got emails from former Chelan visitors from as far away as Russia all screeching at the absurdity of giving up something good and genuine for something that’s just another plastic copy of the franchised mediocrity found everywhere.

Locals, too, were appalled, finding it unfathomable that their elected officials would even think of selling out a local family selling out Chelan’s soul! for a measly $16,500 a year in corporate lucre. Surely some big cloud of loco dust had entered the council chambers and momentarily turned them into yelping, mouth foaming lunatics.

Whatever, the council clearly swal-lowed a bottle of Old Civic castor oil, for at their next meeting, only one week later, they were miraculously cured of McDonald’s it is, voting 70 to terminate negotiations and return to the Mack family.

Guerrilla Art

The beauty of the American people’s deeply ingrained public spirit is that it doesn’t focus solely on publicly owned spaces. The thing that matters is communi-ty and the public good, and the spirit often asserts itself in the most unexpected places and in the most delightful ways.

It raised its pretty head in Seattle, in a hard-hit neighborhood that had long been notorious for drug dealing and street crime. The "event" took place on a stark street in mid August 2002 at about 1 A.M. It would’ve gone unrecorded except that Marcus Brown, a college student, was up late working on a paper in his apartment across the street. He said he heard what sounded like heavy construction, so he went to the window. There was a group of a dozen men and women twenty and thirty somethings. They wielded blowtorches, bolts, heavy sheet metal, and tools. He called out to them, asking what was up . . . but no response, nobody would talk to him. They moved efficiently and professionally, building a metal structure on the sidewalk.

What quickly emerged was a sturdy but stylishly modern table. A flower vase was bolted to the top and four metal and wood seats were built around the table and linked to it with heavy chains. One of the seats was a metal replica of a suitcase, which opened to reveal an electronic board game and a set of vintage playing cards. The artists were thoughtful enough to provide batteries for the game.

They then took a picture of themselves around their artistic game table, put a big bouquet of fresh flowers in the vase, and ppffft they were gone.

The table was built outside of a coffee shop, Cafe Stellina, opened by a couple only four months earlier. The owner of the building said of the surprise gift, "I take it as an artist’s investment in the neighbor-hood to support this place for people to gather."

Cafe owner Teri Esensten was more ecstatic: "It’s incredible;’ she enthused, call-ing it a "big sweet kiss." She says the people of the neighborhood, who’ve not seen a lot of beauty or philanthropy in these rough city blocks, have been gathering around the table at all hours, even when the cafe is closed and keeping the vase filled with flowers.

Such acts are not at all uncommon. For example, a few blocks from my home, there’s a small traffic median on a side street. It was a barren and forlorn patch of dirt and weeds, a triangle of maybe twenty feet on each side. No one paid it any mind it was functional. Until a couple of years ago when it suddenly flowered blossom-ing into an island of native perennials.

Had the city come out to do this? No. Was it the work of garden clubs? No. Who did it?

We still don’t know. We know that it’s the handsome contribution of an older woman who lives somewhere nearby, for she’s been seen digging, planting, water-ing, and nurturing this spot of public beauty. A few do know her name, but she wants absolutely no acknowl-edgment, so they rightfully keep her secret. Some have offered a bit of money to offset the water bill and upkeep, but she won’t hear of it. It’s her contribution. I can point to dozens of these kinds of public gifts in Aus-tin alone, and I know you can find them where you live, too. I contrast them to what I call the "conspicuous philanthropists" corporations and rich people, such as Michael Dell (Dell Computer) in my town and Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft) in Washington state. They have uncountable wealth, but they only dab bits of it out here and there with great ceremony and press conferences, getting their names chiseled into the building and their pictures on the front pages while taking care behind the scenes to make sure that their accounting departments get them a full tax deduction for their philanthropy.

The guerrilla sidewalk artists of Seattle didn’t leave a card, much less cut their names in the metal table. Austin’s lady gardener of the traffic triangle would be so offended she’d faint if anyone suggested that she seek a tax deduction for the sum-mer water bills she runs up keeping that little spot beautiful for all of us who pass it.

This is the true spirit of America, the public spirit that the rest of the world rarely glimpses and that we’re rarely shown by our own media and political powers. This is the spirit we must highlight, tap into . . . and build our democratic future on.

Whose Town Is It?

Does WalMart and other bigbox stores like Home Depot, or formula chains like Starbucks have any inherent right to storm into your neighborhood or town, destroying the local identity, engaging in predatory pricing to force out local competitors, bust-ing the middle-class pay scale, sprawling its garish stores and traffic over any sense of community scale, rigging secret backroom deals with politicians and developer sand generally occupying your community while it extracts cash from your local economy and hauls it off to corporate headquarters?

No.

You have the rights. You’re still the sovereign in this country, not corporations. It’s your town, not theirs.

That’s what Kathleen Lewis decided when she learned in 2001 that her com-munity of Glendale, Arizona, was about to be WalMarted. It was a typical WalMart sneak attack. A local developer in Glendale, a middle-class suburb of Phoenix, had earlier announced its intention to build a "neighborhood shopping plaza," promising that it would be a "visual oasis" of shops and restaurants. Sure, OK, said the city council, and few folks paid any attention, until . . . KABLAM! With the deal sealed, the developer finally dropped the bomb: The anchor "shop" in the development was to be Wal Mart.

Not a mere store, either, but a Super-Center. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one of these things, but they are to big what Enron was to naughty. Big doesn’t say it this one was to be 220,000 square feet. That’s more than four football fields under one roof. Plus parking lots. Plus the roar of delivery trucks and a constant snarl of traffic, with thirty-six thousand cars a day added to the neighborhood. Plus those orangish Day Glo lights that add such a charming touch of urban ambiance. Plus the fact that this was to be a twenty four hour, seven days a week operation.

Kathleen Lewis considers herself con-servative, a Republican even, and certainly a supporter of free enterprise. But this wasn’t free enterprise it was corporate bul-lying by an enormous outfit that feels free to sledgehammer its way into any commu-nity without even asking locals what they think. "One thing I know," says Kathleen, "is the difference between right and wrong. And this was wrong."

She made some calls and talked to neighbors, finding that she was not alone in her outrage that some faraway pencil pushers would be so arrogant and menda-cious as to decide unilaterally to remake this Arizona community in the WalMart image. Around their kitchen tables, Kathleen and other madashellers, who had not previously considered themselves to be rebels, organized The Glendale Rebellion. Kathleen’s local shop, the Headlines Styl-ing & Barbering Service, became the head-quarters for their new group, The Glendale Citizens for Responsible Development.

Like a rhinoceros flicking at a gnat with its tail, Bentonville paid no mind to the group until whoa! What is this? the city council withdrew its zoning approval for the project, citing the obvious fact that it had been lied to. All the way from Arizona, you could hear the corporate jet revving up in Arkansas.

"Unfair!" screeched WalMart opera-tives. And, in a remarkably obtuse bit of irony, the autocratic behemoth demanded something it had already denied the people: democracy. It called for a citywide refer-endum on the project, hired a lobbyist to direct its campaign, and proceeded to dump hundreds of thou-sands of dollars into slick ads, a special five-minute video mailed to twenty thousand homes, and other campaign tactics, includ-ing mudslinging denigration of the opponents.

Against this show of corporate firepower, the Glendale group had only $8,600 to spend, but it mustered a wealth of people power and democratic de-termination. Local 99 of the United Food and Commercial Workers joined the fray, going door to door, engaging thousands of families in front porch conversations about this wage busting corporation. Local busi-nesses got involved against the Arkansas predator, knowing of WalMart’s ruthless practice of selling beneath its own costs in order to drive out local competitors.

Even the

Arizona Republica — a paper owned by Dan Quayle’s family stood against the corporate intrusion, noting that "we pay a price in civic capital" when a WalMart muscles its way in over inde-pendent business, adding that "a workforce of part-time employees hardly builds the wealth necessary to allow families to get ahead."

WalMart kept reaching into its bot-tomless bag of money and political tricks to pull out a victory. For example, to confuse the issue, it got the ballot question worded so that voters wanting to say "no" to the project had to vote "yes" Orwell meets Kafka. It ran ads and distributed fliers in this conservative town warning that "Big Labor" bosses and goons were picking on poor little Wally and trying to dictate to the people of Glendale apparently unaware that quite a few of the town’s people are union mem-bers who have extended family, friends, and solid roots there (more than could be said of the Bentonville bunch).

As election day ap-proached, WalMart got goosey about its chances and rushed to court to demand a postpone-ment. Yes, a postponement of an election that it had set. But the court nixed the ploy, the election was held, the turn-out was twice what it usually is . . . and WalMart was stunned that the tally wasn’t even close Glendale voted 6040 against being WalMarted.

More stunning was that this was the tenth time in three years that local coalitions had come together in various Arizona cities and stopped new WalMart stores. Arizona!

Nothing all that unique about Ari-zona, either, for people coast to coast have been standing up to WalMart projects . . . and winning. Here are a few of the com-munity victories in just the past couple of years: Belfast (ME), Chestertown (MD), Dallas, DeLand (FL), Denver, Dubuque, Henderson (KY), Inglewood (CA), Manor (PA), Martinez (CA), McKinney (TX), New Orleans, Old Saybrook (CT), Sandfly (GA), Santa Fe, Spring Valley (TX), Reed-ley (CA), Taos, and Westerville (OH).