Julia Butterfly Hill, Adam Werbach, Andy Dick and Jello Biafra drew in a standing-room-only crowd of two or three thousand to Eastern Washington University near Spokane, Washington. "I'm that tree chick" was how Butterfly Hill introduced herself to a crowd that may have largely been drawn in by the celebrity of the MTV/"News Radio" star Andy Dick and Dead Kennedy's singer and founder of the Alternative Tentacles label Jello Biafra. Butterfly spent two years living atop a 1000 year old redwood tree in California to save it from the chainsaws of Maxxam Corporation's Pacific Lumber. She told of the car accident that changed her from a yuppie business consultant to a tree hugger. She described the spiritual awakening that accompanied her first tree-hugging experience, and encouraged everyone to go out that night when no one was looking and try it themselves. Yes, literally hugging a tree. Cynics may go back to reading Slashdot and the Daily Rotten now; you've never made a difference one way or another anyway, have you?

Adam Werbach did a bit of stand-up comedy in telling how, upon being elected as, at age 23, the youngest-ever president of the 700,000 strong Sierria Club, he was invited to the White House, where a robotic Al Gore put him to sleep. Later he was somehow invited to attend Bill Clinton's signing ceremony at the Grand Canyon in Arizona (where the votes are) of an order to protect wilderness in Utah (where the land in question was), and though he didn't fall asleep this time, he was a little discouraged at Clinton's obsession with talking about Newt Gingrich, rather than listening to Adam argue for the environment. Getting inside the halls of power is not the only way to change your world. In fact, you may get inside and find yourself changing things less than the lone activist on the outside with nothing but the integrity to think for herself and to speak up, even when everyone is telling you that in America today, you have to "watch what you say."

Andy Dick was there perhaps to make characters like Jello seem sane, while ironically coming across in some ways as more down-to-earth than any of them. Butterfly's and Adam's call to not heed the President's order for all Americans to get out and go shopping was right on target. But when her list of things you can do went from the simple and practical, like carrying a re-usable coffee cup instead of throwing away dozens of "disposable" ones every week to the compulsive and slightly neurotic: counting the number of paper towels you toss each time you use the rest room and scrimping on them to save the forests. Dick's over-the-top songs of life as a stalker and his pleas to let him keep his "cock and balls" were sick, weird, trolllish and just the thing to restore a little perspective.

Similarly, Jello Biafra sounded a bit cranky in his comparisons to the anthrax panic to the hoax of the Vietnam War's Tonkin Gulf incident, or vague fears about Bush's plan to put nuclear satellites in orbit as part of his Star Wars scheme. Lacking specific evidence, Jello's frightening scenarios aren't of much use us. Interestingly, like George W. Bush, whose grammar goes all to hell whenever he's telling a lie, the masterfully articulate Jello starts speaking in incomplete sentences whenever he is painting an ill-supported conspiracy scenario.

Jello's speech and logic were more sound on topics such as the unreliability of our "allies" Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, among others, and when he was reminding everyone that one may quite justifiably not be for George W. Bush and his reckless policies and still neither be for "the terrorists." We do not live in such an either-or world, and it was nice to see people -- big crowds of quite ordinary people -- who were willing to say so, loudly and in public.

This event was the last in the current schedule of the Spitfire Tour, but you can find future dates added at the spitfire.org site, and can look forward to more challenging personalities such as those at EWU, or previous speakers Woody Harrelson, Ralph Nader, Perry Farrel and Tom Tomorrow.

It felt good to be reminded that there are a lot of weird people in the world, and some of them are weirder than me. A lot weirder. But what really made my day was seeing that while our troops bravely put their lives on the line, perhaps motivated by an idealistic belief in freedom and democracy, there are a happy few left back home who have the courage to stand up to the media and to our regressive government and say what they really think. If we are to defend freedom in these times, it must be by exercising our freedoms, not by casting them aside as petty frills, to be taken up again in easier times. When you realize the implications of the Bush Administration's staunch oppostition to putting any expiration date on their new restrictions on your freedom of speech, freedom of association, on your privacy, and on the civil rights of the accused, you realize that the fanatical fascists of Al Quaeda are winning their battle against the basic values of Western civilization. They are winning by making us afraid of our own civil rights and civil liberties.

The Bill of Righs has lost one battle after another in recent weeks, and as long as Americans cower in the face of the enemies of our freedoms, more losses will follow. How bad it gets before it starts to get better, if it ever gets better, is in entirely in your power to decide. It is strictly a question of courage, nothing else.