The stage is being set for another round of media examinations of “military culture” thanks to the ever weirder and more sordid saga of former Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY). For the uninitiated or those awakening from a deep coma, Massa is the recently resigned congressman who is coming under microscopic media scrutiny for alleged acts of inappropriate behavior, some of it allegedly constituting sexual harassment. In recent days, the media have been drilling down into his 24-year career as a naval officer and in the process, some pretty disturbing tales have been percolating to the surface.
During Lawrence O’Donnell’s March 10 guest hosting gig on MSNBC’s Countdown show, he wondered aloud, “Who has done more damage to the image of the Navy, Congressman Massa or the Village People?” a reference to the disco group and its 1979 hit In the Navy.
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The blog at The Economist goes even farther, stating that Massa’s tales of high jinks on the high seas is entirely plausible:
Eric Massa, who is resigning from Congress over the possibility of a male staffer raising allegations of sexual harassment, has been explaining a series of jokes and misunderstandings over the years involving gay sex. Mr. Massa, who served in the Navy, says he’s a “salty old sailor.” I find this explanation entirely convincing.
Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff, during an appearance on The Ed Show, was even more direct in his assessment, explaining how Massa’s alleged indiscretions were escalating to far higher levels:
Yesterday, it was a problem for the Democrats. Last night it was a problem for Glenn Beck. Today it’s a bigger problem for the Navy.
In the meantime, Massa himself has been using the opportunity to feed the media machine with tales of nearly ubiquitous “tickle fights” during his naval career and a traditional seafaring initiation ritual as an “orgy” as if to excuse his conduct with his own ‘that’s just how it was back in the day’ narrative.
First off, no, that’s not how it was back in the day. I served six years in the Navy, some of that time overlapping with Massa’s. I never once saw anything that remotely resembled some of what the former congressman describes as routine behavior in the fleet. Granted, I was a lowly enlisted man but in the course of two Mediterranean deployments and one Indian Ocean deployment, I never once heard of or participated in a tickle fight.
As for Massa’s description of his 1983 Shellback initiation as an “orgy” again, all I can say is that what he describes does not even remotely compare with my 1982 initiation onboard the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67). Sure, I was compelled to crawl through garbage and undergo any number of similar, silly humiliations, all of which have been part of naval lore in all fleets of all nations for many centuries. But an orgy? No way.
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Missing from all of this for the time being is the fact that the behavior described by Massa’s accusers is illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the legal system under which all military personnel are held accountable. If an officer were found to be engaged in coercive behavior involving real or perceived sexual harassment, it would be impossible for that officer to escape punishment absent a conspiracy to hide the facts. A review of the 1991 Tailhook scandal provides a pretty good primer of how that all works.
This is likely where the story will head, in an examination of military culture. It will be voluminous and highly negative of the Navy. It will often fail to note that any offenders represent a miniscule number of Navy personnel and will seek to portray isolated instances of poor behavior as pervasive. Whether this will be pushed into the media bloodstream via a continued congressional ethics inquiry of Massa or enterprise reporting by some news organization seeking a scapegoat in pursuit of a fresh journalism prize remains to be seen. Either way, the media need a well defined set of villains and victims in order to sustain coverage of this or any other issue and the way this story is shaping up, I my guess is we’ll be hearing more, and more lurid, tales of conduct unbecoming in the weeks and months to come.
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