From sailors. About a half dozen U.S. Navy (all but one retired) have already emailed expressing their disappointment with the headline to my Fox column, “Drunk With Power, Spending Like Drunken Sailors.”

Like this one:

I have proudly served in the U.S. Navy for almost 10 years and I find the title of your article offensive. The stereotype of the Dean Martin-esque sailor running drunk and wasting every cent in their pockets on booze and women is as outdated and crude as the black faced skits of Amos and Andy. The fact that you can turn on any movie or television show and find a drunken sailor staggering about somewhere is way out of line and you are helping to perpetuate that myth. Our sailors are not drunks and compulsive spenders. The Navy discourages, drinking, drugs, and smoking. Our training is some of the most advanced and technical available anywhere in a wide array of fields ranging from music performance to culinary arts to nuclear engineering. Your callous show of contempt for the U.S Navy and the fine blue jackets that have fought and died to defend you sickens me.. I hope you take that into consideration the next time you are throwing around phrases and euphemisms to make you r headline a bit more catchy.

FYI, I have nothing to do with headlines. I don’t even see them until the article goes live, much less write or approve them.

I think this guy may be overreacting just a bit. But yeah, I’d always thought the “drunken sailor” line was odd. Do drunk sailors really spend a lot of money? Given military wages, I wouldn’t think so.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 6:36 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.