I turned 51 last week, and I'm one of those people who instinctively cringe at the very mention of "folk music", and refer to the years 1959-63 as The Great "Folk Scare". My attitude towards folk music very much matches that of John Belushi in Animal House (all you 50-plus types, you know what I mean). The first Dylan album I bought in high school was "Highway 61 Revisited", and my favorite albums of his were always the electric ones. I think Joan Baez is a helluva singer, but artistically overwrought and generally full of herself. My favorite acoustic protest songs are few and far between, among them Dylan's Masters Of War and Bob Marley's Redemption Song.

My favorite protest songs have generally been rock'n'roll songs — The Clash's London's Burning, The Fugs' Kill For Peace, The Who's bone-crushing version of Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues from Live At Leeds.

The issue Rovics raises here, though, is not so much what style of music works for you as why the hell most antiwar/other Leftâ„¢ events these days are so friggin' bone-crushingly tedious and boring. ANSWER's the worst of the bunch; my hat's off to 'em for turning the big numbers out, but I think they could get by with half the speakers they usually have, and filling the rest of that time with some goddamn' music of as many styles as possible — hip-hop, reggae, ska, rock'n'roll, and some good old acoustic folkie stuff for all the old Liberal geezers out there.

The last rally I was at that ANSWER put on, the speakers' stand was packed to the gills with the chairs of "steering committees" of so many ANSWER chapters that by the time it was over I found myself asking, "Steering committees? Enough of the friggin' steering committees; don't these people have a goddamn' brakes committee, already? My goddamn' brain is hurting!"

The point here is that speeches, in general, are just plain friggin' boring as shit, unless your speaker happens to be Graylan Hagler or someone else who really knows how to grab your attention and belt out a message. In the past year or two, I'd gotten to the point where, when editing my protest newsreels, I'd go out of my way to edit a piece that deliberately excludes the goddamn' speeches, showing instead action that went down on the streets, backgrounded with either some music performed at the opening rally, or from my old LP collection — anything to avoid subjecting my audience to more rambling from some obscure NGO hack mesmerized by the sound of his own voice coming out of a large PA system.

I don't know about you, but January a year ago, I wasn't exactly inspired by Jesse Jackson yelling "Keep Hope Alive!" ten thousand times; the only speeches I included in my newsreel of that day were a couple of RCP guys rapping through a bullhorn to the impatient crowd waiting for Rev. Jesse to shut the fuck up so they could march — because, quite honestly, out of all the speechifying I heard that day, the two RCP dudes were the only ones who seemed to have anything even halfway interesting to say. (Needless to say, there was no music that day that I recall, and was forced to crib a track off an old Jefferson Airplane album).