I finally saw Top Gun 2! An unfair review with spoilers.
Dear T,
Top Gun 2 is a story about a 90 year-old man teaching diversity hires to fly 40 year old planes against an unnamed rogue state (Russia). It would have been a short movie, but the rogue state got a new weapon so dangerous that they had to put it inside a crater. And once it was in the crater you could only shoot it one totally original way. That is, by flying through a valley covered in turrets, sending a missile down a hatch, and fighting off a bunch of TIE Fighters.
It would have been an easy mission, but the rogue state (Russia) had better fighters and missiles, mostly because they'd been spending their money on planes instead of transgender studies and weak allies like NATO. Anyhow, despite the funding to NATO, which we paid them specifically to deal with this, we were closer to Russia and better than everybody in NATO anyway, as usual. So to defeat this existential threat we sent four F-18 Hornets, which went into service while I was in diapers, and were held together by duct tape, and piloted by the cast of Captain Planet. Our team didn’t get along at first, but Tom Cruise had them play one round of volleyball with their shirts off. After this they were like a family.
Needless to say, Tom Cruise faced tougher enemies than the unnamed rogue state (Russia). First off was his own admiral (played by Jon Hamm), who didn't understand the real meaning of genius, which is making your boss mad. He was even angry at Tom Cruise for disobeying orders and flying a plane so fast that it blew up and sent debris flying all over mainland America to keep his friends employed. But nobody was hurt because he ejected his plane at light speed and landed in a diner in Montana. The plane was totally incinerated and he wasn't. He ordered a water and all the locals cheered.
Anyway, after exactly zero surgeries he finds himself back in California, where he meets his ex-girlfriend — somebody from the last movie's great-granddaughter, who he met while she was in grade school. Their actual relationship was never witnessed or even mentioned anywhere else over the last 40 years, so the writers had to gaslight all of us and make references to it like we'd already seen it in another movie. I admit I was confused about all this, and I wondered where the other lady from the last movie went. But I was half drunk, so I suspended my disbelief with relative ease. It turned out his last romantic interest was in a nursing home anyway, so the writers had to take some liberties.
Anyhow, Mav runs into the new/old woman by accident at a bar she owns — an institution so wholesome that everybody goes drinking in uniform, and if a random man in a mustache unplugs the jukebox and plays Great Balls of Fire on a piano, why, nobody objects, and everybody gathers around and sings it (a scene harder to believe than the actual mission, since nobody still listens to Great Balls of Fire). Tom Cruise was then hit on by all the pilots just like he hit on his old instructor in the last movie. And would you believe it, the next day they’re sitting in class, and in walks the instructor they all hit on. The best part of the last movie!
Tom Cruise works the Rainbow Coalition pretty hard, but nobody can fly the mission but him. So Jon Hamm has a great idea: why not fire Tom Cruise and get all the pilots killed and fail the mission? This is when everybody objects to failing and dying, and the only solution is to have Tom Cruise just fly the mission himself. He takes Goose’s kid with him, and everybody gets out alive because if Goose's kid got killed too the movie would have been a comedy, and in another twenty years we’d have Tom Cruise kill Goose's grandkid too.
I'm clowning on the movie pretty hard, but I enjoyed it the whole way through (except the scene with Great Balls of Fire) and I recommend it to every American who isn't worried about diversity hires flying 40 year-old planes against enemies with Chinese allies and state-of-the-art technology. In other words, our real-life situation, minus the Maverick.
Yours,
-J
P.S. To this last paragraph it might be asked, how do you know they’re diversity hires? To that question I'd ask, how do you know they aren’t?
This is the great trouble with enforcing diversity. When the Army, or a university, or the American Medical Association promotes "diversity,” the only person you can be sure deserves the promotion is the "least diverse” person in the room. Everybody else, no matter how skilled, becomes suspect. And there’s no way to clear them from it. Every time they walk into a room, the degree, instead of making a statement, raises a question. A painful place for the graduate to be in. Almost as painful as having cancer and getting a diversity hire for a doctor.
Of course the term diversity hire is an insult. It means your skill had less value for you than your skin color, your religion, or your sexual orientation. In other words you were hired for the job based on anything other than your ability to do the job.
It was meant to be charity but it ended up being robbery. First robbed are the people who deserved the job and didn’t get it. Second are the people who deserved the job and everybody thinks they didn't. But third — and easily the worst off — are the people who think they’re going to get something good and end up getting hurt. Say, for instance, the mothers who get misdiagnosed and end up dying for no good reason. Or the teenagers who get a faulty car that stops working right when they’re on the freeway. Or our siblings who trust buildings that collapse on them. Or the sons who get shot to pieces because their general was incompetent.
Am I being extreme here? I would argue this is exactly what’s happening, as blue states are ditching grading systems, and lowering standards for bar exams, and barring Whites and Asians from all kinds of advanced schools — as they have to, in order to make "equity” happen. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reports,
In 2021, 28 percent of Black test takers were rated ready for college-level courses in English, compared to 67 percent of Whites. In mathematics, only 10 percent of Blacks were rated college-ready compared to 44 percent of Whites. In science, ACT data shows 11 percent of Blacks were ready for college-level courses compared to 44 percent of Whites. In reading, 18 percent of Blacks achieved the minimal benchmark for college readiness compared to 53 percent of Whites. All of these scores for college readiness for both Blacks and Whites were down from 2020.
The most striking statistic is that only 6 percent of all Black test takers were rated ready for college-level courses in all four areas of English, mathematics, science, and reading. Whites were more than five times as likely as Blacks to be prepared for college-level work in all four areas.
What will "equal representation” mean in the end? That America will be cheaper, dumber, and more dangerous — that everyone will have to pay, dearly, to make liberals feel holy and halfwits feel included. I swear this will all backfire massively.
But will we know about it? Yes, but mainly in private. The great advantage of Team Diversity is that we’ll never see exactly how much damage they cause. Every product they mangle, every business and institution they crumble, every life that’s lost unnecessarily — every genius we never discovered — is swept under the rug so that the rest of our knockoffs can shine. And the world we could have had, a world pregnant with actual talents and poetry and beauty, dies stillborn. Or maybe you could say it was aborted. And when the mother dies and the son gets mangled, every single instance will be just that — a single instance. A life flushed down the drain without a news story, or a movie, or a movement. Not even a statistic, as collecting the numbers for such things is impossible. We wanted everyone to be represented, and everybody was — except the man who deserved to be, and the ruined consumer he could have saved.
In the end, the greatest argument against White Supremacy, if not Nazi Germany, will be our American South. And the greatest argument for it will be the society we engineered to replace it.
Accurate review, as I can tell, J. And, very funny and very true! We're in a dark place, where diversity trumps almost everything criterion meaningful, when evaluating competence in any entity. A welcome turnaround will occur only after those currently in power are collectively bitten by defects revealed within that same diversity.