by Jeff Huber
Few people abuse power and authority worst than an executive officer of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier who is a bully and a bigot and a mean spirited egotist. I’m not sure if
Capt. Owen Honors, the former XO of the carrier USS
Enterprise who just got the deep six as the ship’s commanding officer, was one of those, but he sure displayed a lot of the symptoms.
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Capt. Honors (right) leads
a damage control party. |
I wasn’t even sure if the affair of Honors (heh) was worth disbursing a thousand words on until I reviewed Jon Stewart’s Daily Show take on it. As is often the case, funny man Stewart just didn’t quite seem to grasp the matter’s gravity, and when Stewart doesn't get something, his Generation X, Y, Z fan base doesn’t get it either.
This is an extreme problem when our nation's youngest citizens get all their news, opinion and analysis from a single source, and YES, I do understand he's just a comedian on the comedy channel - but he has a lot of power and influence and needs to wield it more responsibly. As always, great catch Jeff.
Many such candidates for adulthood who haunt the web are in the military and they don’t see what the big deal was with the skits Honors aired on the ship’s TV station four years or more ago. Heck, you see professional comedians like Jon Stewart do those kinds of things all the time.
The distinction they fail to recognize is that comedians like Jon Stewart aren’t executive officers of nuclear aircraft carriers. And, oh yeah, from the looks of the
video that’s been zorching across the information highway the past few weeks, Capt. Honors is no comedian.
In a more unfocused than usual segment on his
Jan. 5 program, Stewart attempted a send-up of, well, one isn’t sure just who the satiric target was—Honors or the Navy or Navy brass or maybe the present state of American humor.
Stewart’s bit, well, it bit, but he
was on the mark in noting that Honors’ skits totally chewed it, man, and they mostly consisted of jokes stolen from Caddy Shack. Honors at one point notes that professional comedians get a lot of laughs from dropping the f-bomb, so he and his zany band of merry maritime players do a bit where they drop the f-bomb a lot, almost as much as Stewart has taken to drop it lately as a last resort when his facial mugging and squeaky voice characterizations fail to cover for the weak material he and his fleet of writers crank out. In all, Honors’ comedic efforts were on par with the kind of thing we saw in the heinous
Porky’s films and only barely superior to what
Saturday Night Live has been shoveling at us from 30 Rock’s public restrooms for the past several years.
But were XO Honors’ bad skits unfunny enough to warrant that Skipper Honors be fired four years and change after they aired?
Stewart implied that Honors was relieved of command for having tried to improve crew morale. I’m not sure if Stewart’s understanding of the issue is that shallow. We can be reasonably confident that Stewart is unaware that XO Movie Night has been a tradition of most Navy aircraft carriers for decades—since 1981 that I’m personally aware of. And it’s a near dead cert that Stewart doesn’t realized that Honors is one of the first, if not the first, CO of a U.S. aircraft carrier to get reassigned to Naval Air Station Palooka over the movie nights he put on as XO of a U.S. aircraft carrier.
Some critical of the Navy’s decision to relieve Honors reflected the Navy’s overzealous sense of political correctness in the touchy-feely 21st century. Well, let me tell you something. In my junior officer days I was the guy who wrote and performed all the comedy skits for my ship or squadron. When I was lowly Lieutenant Huber in the late 80s, before we had women on Navy ships and things at sea were still as salty as a Philly pretzel, I did a skit—admittedly a very bad one—in which I did an impersonation of a Filipino officer that came this close to keeping me from being promoted to Lieutenant Commander Huber. If I had pulled one of the stunts Honors pulled week after week on his XO Theater, I would have been flown home from the middle of a deployment that day, not four years from that day.
In his video, then XO Honors makes what must be intended as a joke about how the CO and the admiral knew nothing about his little ship’s TV skits. Ha. Ha. There’s no way they couldn’t have known about Honors’ shenanigans, and they clearly approved of them if only tacitly. I don’t even care to know who the CO and the admiral were, but it would be interesting to know if they’re still on active duty and why nobody is grilling them about this escapade. That the Navy did nothing about Honors’ programs until the Virginian Pilot did an expose on them four years after the fact signals everything you need to really know about how seriously the service’s top leadership takes the Navy’s phony-baloney “
core values.”
It also tells you that the Navy has the kind of institutional atmosphere that allows someone like Honors to rise as high as he did. I’m perfectly willing to grant for the sake of argument that there isn’t a mean spirited bone in Honors’ body, and that he honestly thought everyone on board the ship understood that he was just fooling around. But if he honestly thought that he suffers from a clownish inability to make sound judgments. On a ship that big, much of the crew, especially the younger sailors who couldn’t know The Big XO very well, would likely think he’s as mean as Jon Stewart is when he has his Daily Show crew punk perfectly sincere nobodies who big-time comedians like Stewart should consider off limits.
But given what we’ve seen of top military leadership throughout the New American Century’s Long War on Evil, being a clown qualifies one for accelerated promotion to the four-star level.
