Partisans aboard the Honors episode

If there is something unsaid about the moviemaking career of Navy Capt. Owen Honors, it's not for lack of trying.

He's a hero; he's a cad.

He's a victim of political correctness, of a civilian "offensensitivity" (to borrow a word from cartoonist Berkeley Breathed) that has no place in the military. He's a reckless aviator who didn't know when to pull up, a bully, a blowhard.

He was just trying to reach his sailors - and did. He's a scapegoat, or he got precisely what he deserved.

Military and not, veteran and not, enlisted and officer, man and woman, the Honors episode has inspired some remarkably furious and polarized reactions. They're also, far too often, utterly predictable.

Mostly, I think the movies were gross (I could've done without watching a guy chew on excrement, or a leather-masked man simulate intercourse with a donkey) and seriously salty in their language. Of course, they're nothing worse than you can see on cable television any night. And if that's your thing and you watch in privacy, follow your dirty, dirty bliss.

These weren't, however, in private. These were part of an official government broadcast, on a government network, on a government ship, by a government manager of government employees.

That they're beyond the bounds of a business setting goes without saying. If I made them, I'd be fired in a heartbeat. If my boss condoned them, he'd be fired in the next.

But I'm not the executive officer on the Enterprise. I'm not in the Navy.

So I've had to talk to guys who are, people who've served on the E. They've convinced me that as mundane as the content of the videos might've been coming from a peer, they were astounded that it came from the boss. Or that he spent so much time making them. In other words, context matters. So does the source.

What doesn't matter is politics, at least in any conventional sense. Except that to some people, it clearly does.

It is not going too far to suggest that personal politics has become the ultimate determinant of how some people view this episode. It colors many of the public pronouncements I've read and heard in the past several days and much of the chatter in the online world.

Which is just bizarre and a little disorienting.

Maybe the polarized reaction has something with the recent repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," except that the Navy's response has less to do with the depiction of juvenile homophobia than with the relentless four-letter dialogue and the scenes mentioned above.

Maybe the overheated rhetoric has something to do with the fact that a reporter had the temerity to relay uncomfortable news, and that fact-based journalism in an opinion-driven world has temporarily lost some of its value.

I have seen Honors' supporters assert that criticism of him is political correctness run amok, as if taking offense at the intentionally offensive is somehow wrong. These are some of the same folks who might and do otherwise declaim an oversexualized culture. Or demand that museums banish artists they claim take indecent liberties with our religions or conventions or heroes.

Others point out that the Navy's or an aircraft carrier's or a pilot's culture is different. They undoubtedly are. But if those values - the rights and the wrongs - are really that radically different from the rest of the nation, then there is work to do.

I don't know the reason for the reflexive divisiveness. But I'm a little worried about the implications. Has politics so invaded our discourse that the indefensible must be defended because it was committed by a member of one political team or the other? Even when we don't know who's on which?

If left/right politics indeed has any role in what Honors did or what resulted from it, it eludes me. If crude language is a particularly Democratic or Republican tic, it'd be news, I suspect, to just about everyone.

I'm not sure whether it is liberals or conservatives who want government employees making elaborate, risque training films when they should be running a ship. And if simulated bestiality is particular to one partisan strain, our politics are in bigger trouble than I thought.

Donald Luzzatto is The Virginian-Pilot's editorial page editor. E-mail: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.