Ah, faux scandals, what would we do without you?
Anti-Military Anthem Played at ‘Concert for Valor’
Ethan Epstein / Weekly StandardWho would have thought that that Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and Zac Brown, accomplished musicians all, would be so, well, tone-deaf? But how else to explain their choice of song—Creedence Clearwater’s famously anti-war anthem ‘Fortunate Son’ …
Famously anti-war anthem?
Oh sir, how dense ye be, when ye decide to create false controversy.
Indeed, “Fortunate Son” is “anti-war” but it is implicitly PRO-soldier, and stands against oligarchy and plutocracy. Wait. I suddenly understand why Little Billy Kristol’s magazine would be against THAT.
Let’s see how “anti military” the “anthem” is, shall we? It’s a pretty simple song. Starts out like this:
Some folks are born made to wave the flag / Ooh, they’re red, white and blue
And when the band plays “Hail to the Chief” / Oh, they point the cannon at you,It ain’t me, it ain’t me / I ain’t no Senator’s son ….
Then it takes the same ironic tone on trust fund babies:
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand / Lord, don’t they help themselves, oh ….
And then, the “objectionable” final verse talks about the rich sending the sons of the poor off to war:
Yeah, some folks inherit star spangled eyes / Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?” /Oh, they only answer, more, more, more, oh
It ain’t me, it ain’t me / I ain’t no military son
No fortunate son …
U.S. Army Spc. Josh Lueken from Bravo Company, 2-87 Infantry Regiment of
3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division provides security at
Observation Post English, Logar province, Afghanistan, April 18, 2014.
The Soldier is forward deployed to Afghanistan in support of
Operation Enduring Freedom. (Photo by U.S. Army Capt. John Landry,
3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division Public Affairs)
And concludes:
I ain’t no fortunate son …
It is a protest against oligarchy and being used as cannon fodder. HOW that is an “anti-military” anthem is a mystery to anyone not drinking kleptocratic Kool-aid®.
There is NOTHING anti-military in that song, and the “anti war” aspect was well understood in Vietnam as it WAS NOT ALLOWED to be expressed on mainstream radio for the Iraq/Afghanistan Double-dip of Death.
But this false witnessing, this serpent’s brew, this Iago-in-Action was just rewarded by the lowest electoral turnout in 72 years.*
(* 1942, but you might agree that they were somewhat preoccupied with a war that had begun less than a year earlier with the sneak attack bombing of Pearl Harbor.)
Turns out that to the Weekly Standard Mind, not only was Iraq justified, but, retroactively, SO WAS VIETNAM! (At least by clear inference.) [Emphasis added]
The song, not to put too fine a point on it, is an anti-war screed, taking shots at “the red white and blue.” It was a particularly terrible choice given that Fortunate Son is, moreover, an anti-draft song, and this concert was largely organized to honor those who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The utter tone-deafness of this “patriot” makes you wonder if he isn’t another Canadian import that GOPs love using so much, seemingly incapable of producing their OWN conservatives. (Steyn, Frum, Krauthammer, etc. etc.)
It boggles the mind to believe that people actually get paid to write this nonsense.
But they do.
Oh, how they do.
Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.
Courage.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.