Driving back from Target today (I bought a super-hippie-style soy wax Eucalyptus/Patchouli candle), I popped in Mike Doughty’s newest record Golden Delicious, which, incidentally, I can bring myself neither to love nor to completely write off.

And one of the main reasons I can’t write it off is the album’s opening track, Fort Hood, a tear-jerking protest song about the Army base that’s lost the most soldiers in this tear-jerking war we’re stuck in. In the process of pondering how Mike can deliver the lines he does in this song–and that’s how he’s able to deliver them, like, without crying–I very nearly caused a disastrous multi-car wreck by totally missing a red light and skidding into crossing traffic, missing a Ford Explorer by only inches as I slid through the cold wet, brakes locked.

Following that near-miss, my adrenaline-fired heart pumped me straight into a serious fit of emotion and when the line:

I see ‘em coming back
Motionless in an airport lounge

hit. That’s when I started thinking about protest songs–and my favorite protest songs.

I love, clichéd though it may be, the preeminent Vietnam War protest song, the masterful Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind.

How many times will the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?

Per usual, Bob says it better than I can say it, and for that matter, better than most anyone can say it.

The protest song is something ultimately special. So pure, so guttural; so much bigger than he or she who writes it, so much stronger than he or she who sings it; so beautiful in its belief that music can spur change. From Marvin Gaye pleading that we “bring some understanding here today” to Jimi Hendrix’s passionate, irreverent electric guitar rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock, filled with bombs, propellers and screams, the form doesn’t matter. The message matters.

So there’s all I can muster for Round One. Help me here. The more we listen, the more we can all find the energy to fight.

Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights.