Critical Introduction & Texts

About Us

Hello readers, thank you for exploring our blog; it is an honor to share our thoughts with you. We are four undergraduate students who attend the University of Maryland,College Park- Oluwatobi Ajide, Jordyn Berry, Mihir Powers, and Dylan D'Andrea. Our goal was to compare and contrast two pieces of anti-war rhetoric from the 1960’s; more specifically texts that criticized the draft. Both the song “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Kiyoshi Kuromiya’s poster “Fuck The Draft” use ethos and a strong appeal to pathos to express the feelings of anger and discontents held by the draftees and their families during the Vietnam War.

Both texts were published in the late 1960’s within a year of one another at the height of the Vietnam war, and have a strong anti-draft sentiment. In “Fortunate Son”  CCR attempts to show how unfair the draft was to all but the richest and luckiest young men. It indirectly protests the Vietnam war by making it clear that many young men have no desire to serve, but are forced to anyway. “Fuck the Draft” takes a much more direct approach. It uses frank boldfaced text and a striking image to show outright rejection of the draft and the war as a whole, encouraging people to take action and protest. Both texts were published in the late 1960’s within a year of one another at the height of the Vietnam war.

We chose to focus on these two texts because while they both were published around the same time and attacked the same issue, they have very different philosophies on how to express their message. The narrator of “Fortunate Son” is a dejected draftee whose views are meant to reflect the views of young men at the time, and in turn make the audience question the country’s actions at the time. The poster overtly denounces the draft and the war. It too is meant to be sympathetic to those people who were facing the draft and their families, but instead of force the audience to question what the country was doing, it takes the argument one step further and pushes them to act out in defiance.

Now, the order of the analyses within the blog is admittedly a little strange, but we agreed that it was most important to analyse the kairos and audience of both texts first, because it is important to have the proper historical context before trying to understand the appeals the creators made. We discussed the social climate around the draft at the time, and also considered the countercultural following that both texts were primarily made for. Next we wanted to explore the extrinsic ethos of the creators of the texts, and how they used strong appeals to pathos to bring their similar opinions across in such different ways.  Once the creators, the time period, and the feelings present were all established, we finished up by explaining the main idea of each text and why they were exigent, taking into account all the previous information.

We hope the blog has enlightened you all to the opinions of people in the late 1960’s draft time, and given you a new insight on an old topic. We also encourage you all to take something away from this analysis. Maybe even try and compare the arguments made here to modern anti-war sentiments and ask yourself what has changed in the past 60 years.

"Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival:

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"
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord
It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no senator's son, son
It ain't me, it ain't me; I ain't no fortunate one, no

Yeah!
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Lord, don't they help themselves, oh
But when the taxman comes to the door
Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yes

It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no millionaire's son, no
It ain't me, it ain't me; I ain't no fortunate one, no

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask them, "How much should we give?"
Ooh, they only answer More! more! more! yoh

It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no military son, son
It ain't me, it ain't me; I ain't no fortunate one, one

It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no fortunate one, no no no
It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no fortunate son, no no no

Anti-draft Poster: