Rod Dreher, fortunate son

Over at the national edition of Wick Allison's trendy and urbane D Magazine, oddly named The American Conservative, Rod Dreher calls out Ethan Epstein at The Weekly Standard (just as oddly not named "conservative" while actually being so) for criticizing Bruce Springsteen's choice to play John Fogerty's "Fortunate Son" at the Veteran's Day "Concert for Valor" on the National Mall. Epstein:

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.

But as readers of EQE already know, Dreher's testicles have not yet descended to the point where he has the courage to make his main point directly, in this case hypocritically and self-loathingly criticizing American military involvements that may later have been second-guessed, including the Iraq War Dreher himself ferociously supported while it was a hot career builder, then later reversed his position on when the opposite point of view filled his rice bowl better instead.

In this instance, Dreher's post ostensibly about Springsteen's song choice (the click bait wrapper) and its criticism (including at The Washington Post) leads incongruously with a full column image of Emmanuel Goldstein Dick Cheney (the comment box bait payload)

The song is not an “anti-war screed”; it is a song protesting the unfairness of the draft, and how the burden of war-fighting fell disproportionately on members of the working class who were not in college, and couldn’t get, say, five Vietnam War draft deferments, like some former vice presidents we could name. In that sense, performing that song last night was perfectly legitimate, even laudatory.

complete with link to a 10-year-old New York Times article.

His carefully vetted disciples in the comment boxes dutifully take up The Weekly Standard/neocon red meat from there with well-trained rodentine reflex.

Well, not all. Aptly named commenter Thomas Aquinas points out

The fact that you have to write this means the song should have not been sung. When celebrating someone’s service, it is deeply insulting to inject anything that would cause division. Why risk upsetting people you are supposed to be supporting?

Controversy, in this case, was not a virtue

No, not a virtue at all, nor Dreher's cynically exploiting the due and appropriate criticism of it by leftist Post and conservative Standard alike in order to suck up to his new isolationist patronage.

So, let's review:

- When he was at National Review, swooning at living in New York City and getting paid the bucks to do so, Rod Dreher loudly supported the Iraq War, and very likely his exhortations in favor of it sent young men and women to die there at no cost to himself.

- During the Vietnam War, Dick Cheney did in fact receive a number of legal draft deferments. He subsequently served as Secretary of Defense and Vice President of the United States. He did not, however, pick Bruce Springsteen's song list.

- Rod Dreher's brother-in-law, Mike Leming, an actual patriot and a veteran, volunteered and served in the Louisiana National Guard, both at home and in Iraq.

- Mike Leming's brother-in-law, Rod Dreher, volunteered to eat oysters in Paris and black truffles in Tuscany.

- Back home, in between those two overseas deployments, he often slept for long stretches during the day because he was depressed about himself.

- He will tell us about that ugly combat in his forthcoming hardback book for sale at something on the order of $20 a copy, the one with Dante in the title (the click bait wrap...well, you already know how that works, now, don't you)

Rod Dreher, fortunate son indeed.

UPDATE (as they say): In the few minutes since I put this post up Dreher has changed the prominently leading image (with its simpering subtitle "A lucky recipient of five Vietnam draft deferments") of Dick Cheney, replacing it with an innocuous one of Bruce Springsteen. Here is the original post I wrote about with the original Cheney image-bait.