BEAT THAT TUNE : The Key to Winning Any Battle Is Singing the Right Song

The first time I put on a pro-choice sweat shirt and an attitude and headed out to join others on a clinic defense may have been the last. Nobody got to me. Nobody brainwashed me. But--jeez, this is humiliating--the other side has better songs.

It takes a lot for me to admit that. In the great Age of Protest, which at my high school amounted to the honor society’s staging a walkout over the Kent State shootings, good songs were mortar to political brickbats, tunes that even the tone-deaf could sing while being dragged off.

They weren’t Mozart. But Mozart never had to crank out something fast to protest the Cambodian incursion. And nothing rhymes with Cambodia anyway.

Yet 20 years later, there we stood, impassioned but silent, in front of a women’s clinic on a rainy Saturday. The few anti-abortion people were singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and our side finally countered, with “She’s Got the Whole World in Her Hands.”

But wait just one hemidemisemiquaver. Is this what it’s come to? Protest hinging on a pronoun? Our leaders were already hurtling into the second verse: “She’s got birth con-troool in her hands.” And the third: “She’s got a wan-ted baby in her hands.”

I unlinked my arms. Give me Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hart, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, anything else, please. I will put myself on the line for my cause, but I will not warble lyrics that sound as if they were written by Mister Rogers on Maalox.

Face it: Even a bad cause can get a lot further with good music. Hymns and marches stir the blood beyond reason and sense, which is good for combat because no reasonable or sensible person might otherwise advance into withering fire.

Richard the Lion-Hearted’s Crusaders marched to the Holy Land singing righteous verses to the tune of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” On the night before Desert Storm started, Stormin’ Norman blasted the war room with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

Next month marks the 200th birthday of France’s anthem, “La Marseillaise,” and some people want to simp up its call to fight “the bloody standard.” Considering that the last battle the French won was in Rick’s Cafe in “Casablanca,” you have to ask: Could they have outsung the Nazis if Paul Henreid had merely been exhorting them to “march hand in hand”?

The current clowder of presidential Demo models still hasn’t punched the right buttons on the jukebox. Bill Clinton’s campaign has stayed away from a theme song as assiduously as he’s disavowed Gennifer Flowers. At least his wife, Hillary, was on to something when she said she’d be darned if she was some “Stand By Your Man” type. That riled Tammy Wynette, but it got everyone humming.

Paul Tsongas likes “Power to the People.” It’s a John Lennon song, but can you sing it? Me neither. And if Jerry Brown had the nerve, he’d borrow a Linda Ronstadt song. It’d be ethnic, memorable and a reminder that he once had a social life. But he’ll probably opt for “America the Beautiful” on a samisen.

Get with it, guys. You think George Bush is going to wrap himself in the Gulf War flag and cue the band to strike up “Ciribiribin”? Even dreary Michael Dukakis unbent enough to get some mileage out of a bass-heavy version of Neil Diamond’s “America.”

Many horse races ago, Al Smith used the doofus “Sidewalks of New York” campaign song. He lost. FDR had a foot-stompin’ oompah version of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” He won.

It’s the same thing I faced on the sidewalk outside that clinic. You can’t let the other guys have all the good songs. If America really votes by sound bite, which do you think is going to grab their hearts and minds--”Onward Christian Soldiers” or “She’s got birth con-troool in her hands”?

So here is my contribution, in case I miss the next Operation Rescue assault: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our Clinic.” I give it a 74. It’s got a good beat, and you can exercise your social conscience to it.