Bread & circuses

When Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott joined the chorus sneering at the military code of loyalty, self-restraint, honesty, and obedience, he committed what is nowadays called a "defining moment." Its immediate effect was to increase the pressure on the Air Force to grant Lt. Kelly Flinn, its first female B-52 pilot, the general discharge she sought -- or, at least, graciously condescended to accept. Lt. Flinn, heroine and victim, had first demanded an honorable discharge in tones of the highest moral indignation. This claim flew in the media and in Congress, and it might have flown in Middle America too if the aggrieved wife of Kelly Flinn's boyfriend had not finally appeared, taking the shine off the lieutenant's heroine status and creating an alternative and more plausible victim.

This came too late to avert the Air Force's overall retreat in the latest gender skirmish. But it served to demonstrate that although the media have great advantages in setting the ideological terms of debate, their power is not absolute. A betrayed wife may be a traditional symbol, but it is one which feminism has not yet managed to demystify or make ridiculous.

By then, alas, Sen. Lott had proved decisively that the cultural elite had the power to intimidate Republican politicians, making them dance to its ideological tune. Those who eagerly condemned antediluvian standards of conduct in the military had uncritically accepted the media's account of the Flinn case as a misogynist assault on a lonely single woman who, innocently, had been seduced by a cad. The Air Force was further accused of applying a cruel double standard by court-martialing a female officer for behavior ignored in the case of male officers. As proof of this double standard, Lt. Flinn's defenders alleged that no male officers were court-martialed despite sexual assaults at Tailhook.

This was nonsense. Despite an exhaustive investigation and the Navy's desperate desire to appease the feminists, there was simply not enough evidence of actual assaults to warrant prosecutions. Plenty of male officers were punished anyway. In his New Yorker article of September 16, 1996, on the suicide of Admiral Mike Boorda, Peter Boyer reports that the careers of 14 admirals and nearly three hundred naval aviators were ended or damaged by Tailhook. (A single admiral lost his job for the laxity that left the American fleet vulnerable at Pearl Harbor.) The Flinn fiasco, incidentally, will be recorded in military history just as inaccurately as Tailhook.

The facts clearly show that Lt. Flinn was well treated by the Air Force from start to finish. The celebrity accorded her as a pioneer pilot testifies to its eagerness to highlight its integration of women into combat assignments. Her celebrity status (including, ironically, media training) might even have perversely persuaded her that she flew above the standards applicable to her earthbound colleagues. But when her messy lovelife became a problem for the Air Force, she received merely equal treatment. Even today's gender-sensitive military recognized that its golden girl had to be grounded if she was guilty of fraternization, flagrant disobedience, and dishonesty.

There are good military reasons for such rules as the policy against fraternization between the ranks. If an officer's orders can lead to death, then good order and discipline demand that no personal friendships undermine or bias his authority. Lt. Flinn knowingly broke this rule and abused her power as a superior officer when she had a casual affair with an enlisted man before she embarked on the more serious affair with Marc Zigo, a civilian living with his junior enlisted wife. In asking that the wrongs she suffered not be ignored, Gayla Zigo told the Secretary of the Air Force that "Less than a week after we arrived to the base, Lt. Flinn was in bed with my husband having sex."

Indeed, the affair was first reported by Mrs. Zigo, who complained to Lt. Flinn's first sergeant. His discreet warning went unheeded. Lt. Flinn's commanding officer then learned of the affair and ordered her to stay away from the married Zigo -- the slap on the wrist that her defenders insist was a sufficient rebuke. It would have been sufficient if Lt. Flinn had obeyed it. But by that time she had elected to live with Zigo rather than fly with the Air Force. And when she was investigated for disobeying this direct order, she lied under oath about the nature of the relationship.

Like a surprising number of women, Kelly Flinn was shocked when the married man she took up with proved untrustworthy. (Elite opinion has a double standard of its own here: it condemns Zigo for being unfaithful not to his wife but to his mistress. The really wronged woman, it seems, is the Other Woman.) When Lt. Flinn finally saw Zigo for a creep, she decided she wanted her Air Force career after all: it was an Airwoman's prerogative to change her mind. Her family hired a public-relations firm, she and her lawyer began their campaign to exploit the sympathetic media, and the rest is History -- or at any rate Current Affairs.