Evaluation of “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival Following World War Two, the two legitimate world powers were the United States and the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union under a communistic government and the United States being a nation founded in Capitalism, tensions between the two nations rose, resulting in the Cold War. Against the wishes of the United States, small countries in East Asia began to turn communist. Fear that one country turning would have a chain reaction turning many more, the United States turned to a policy of ‘containment’. This policy was tested in the Korean War and would be again tested in the Vietnam War. Starting as a War with the communist North Vietnam against South Vietnam and the French,
Famous American billionaire, Donald Trump, did just this by avoiding the draft with the deferment due to college enrollment and after his graduation he received a medical deferment from “sympathetic medical students [who] helped us search for disqualifying conditions that we… might have overlooked”. This practice remotely resembled the unfair practice of hiring a replacement to fight in one’s stead if they were drafted during the civil war which heightened interclass tension. Beginning in the third verse of the song, there is a major shift from Fogerty describing the “fortunate” individuals who have avoided to war, to the “unfortunate” ones who have been drafted and are being sent overseas to fight. The first two lines of the verse read, “Yeah, some folks inherit star spangled eyes, Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord”. Fogerty uses the word “inherit” to make it apparent that those individuals did not choose to be there but were made to. He also uses the word “they” in reference to those previously mentioned in the song who are politically and financially in power and think themselves socially superior to the common American citizen which is why the “unfortunate” are the ones going to the war. The next two lines follow the theme of class superiority, reading, “And when you ask them, “How much should