Good day, sailor!
The US Navy has embraced the Bud Light approach to promoting itself — enlisting an active-duty drag queen to spice up recruitment within the face of significant personnel shortfalls.
It’s laborious to say which is extra shocking — that the Navy would do such a factor, or that it has a drag queen on lively obligation within the first place.
Nevertheless it does: Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, a so-called social-media influencer simply designated a “digital ambassador” to American youth.
That’s definitely a novel strategy to a urgent downside — the Navy is taking a look at enlistment deficits numbering within the 1000’s this 12 months, after having already introduced recruiting requirements to worrisome lows.
So even much less needs to be extra, proper?
Unlikely.
Courting cultural discontinuity in all probability received’t appeal to the type of sailors America’s historically conservative naval service wants; in spite of everything, didn’t the Bud Mild folks drift out of their lane final month, and be taught a harsh lesson?
Furthermore, embracing the compulsive narcissism of the drag universe may very properly yield recruits that the naval service actually doesn’t need anyway.
Individualism has its place, to make sure, however not usually aboard a warship.
A crew lives, works and — most significantly — trains collectively to fulfill doubtlessly existential challenges as a unit.
It’s about “we,” not “me,” the polar reverse of what animates drag — and, to a distressing diploma, the nationwide zeitgeist usually.
Actually.
If the drag motion can get away with forcing college kids to sit down nonetheless for story hours — and it does, daily — why ought to the Navy be immune?
Certainly, everyone seems to be now anticipated to just accept, if not have fun, just about each impulse humanity can generate.
This ostensibly is finished within the title of “inclusiveness” — however really it’s as a result of America has misplaced the braveness to say no with any conviction.
Yesterday’s pedophile is being redefined as tomorrow’s “minor-attracted individual” — you’ll be able to look that up.
And this could shock no separately when organic males are being cheered as they make a mockery of ladies’s sports activities.
It didn’t begin there, after all. Nevertheless it’s not prone to finish there, both.
Most of New York Metropolis’s apparent social ills — road crime, subway platform-pushing, organized shoplifting gangs, weed outlets on each nook, you title it — are on the identical elementary spectrum.
What actually was a protected, self-confident metropolis a decade in the past not actually is — as a result of activists objected to enforcement; politicians pandered, every-day New Yorkers misplaced their nerve and the slide started.
One factor actually does result in one other.
After all the Navy will survive this nonsense, but it surely probably might be weakened by it.
And as tensions develop within the Western Pacific, can the nation actually afford such self-indulgence?
E mail: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc
