Hello, sailor!
The US Navy has embraced the Bud Light approach to selling itself — enlisting an active-duty drag queen to boost recruitment in the face of serious personnel shortfalls.
It’s hard to say which is more surprising — that the Navy would do such a thing, or that it has a drag queen on active duty in the first place.
But it does: Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, a so-called social-media influencer just designated a “digital ambassador” to American youth.
That’s certainly a novel approach to a pressing problem — the Navy is looking at enlistment deficits numbering in the thousands this year, after having already brought recruiting standards to worrisome lows.
So even less should be more, right?
Not likely.
Courting cultural discontinuity probably won’t attract the sort of sailors America’s traditionally conservative naval service needs; after all, didn’t the Bud Light people drift out of their lane last month, and learn a harsh lesson?
Moreover, embracing the compulsive narcissism of the drag universe might very well yield recruits that the naval service really doesn’t want anyway.
Individualism has its place, to be sure, but not generally aboard a warship.
A crew lives, works and — most importantly — trains together to meet potentially existential challenges as a unit.
It’s about “we,” not “me,” the polar opposite of what animates drag — and, to a distressing degree, the national zeitgeist generally.
Really.
If the drag movement can get away with forcing school children to sit still for story hours — and it does, every day — why should the Navy be immune?
Indeed, everyone is now expected to accept, if not celebrate, virtually every impulse humanity can generate.
This ostensibly is done in the name of “inclusiveness” — but actually it’s because America has lost the courage to say no with any conviction.
Yesterday’s pedophile is being redefined as tomorrow’s “minor-attracted person” — you can look that up.
And this should surprise no one at a time when biological males are being cheered as they make a mockery of women’s sports.
It didn’t start there, of course. But it’s not likely to end there, either.
Most of New York City’s obvious social ills — street crime, subway platform-pushing, organized shoplifting gangs, weed shops on every corner, you name it — are on the same fundamental spectrum.
What truly was a safe, self-confident city a decade ago no longer really is — because activists objected to enforcement; politicians pandered, every-day New Yorkers lost their nerve and the slide began.
One thing really does lead to another.
Of course the Navy will survive this nonsense, but it likely will be weakened by it.
And as tensions grow in the Western Pacific, can the nation really afford such self-indulgence?
Email: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc
This story originally appeared on NYPost
