I’ve been thinking a lot about stolen valor lately. Stolen valor refers to the federal crime of falsely representing yourself as having received a military decoration or medal. In fact, it’s illegal to wear, buy, sell, trade, or manufacture any military decoration. It is even illegal to claim to have been given a military award, either orally or in writing.
It’s considered a serious enough phenomenon to have required this law, and the public rage against the people who commit this crime is such that stolen valor video compilations on YouTube regularly get millions of views.
These awards cannot be given to every service member who may have deserved one. “I accepted the medal for the many people who got nothing,” said Medal of Honor recipient and former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey. “The way medals are handed out,'' he said, "you have to have a (military) action, and it has to be witnessed. There were a lot of very, very brave men and women whose actions weren't recognized. I received the medal on behalf of them.''
That rarity makes it all the more insulting to veterans when someone falsely claims to have earned a recognition which they did nothing to deserve.
I think the reason I’ve been thinking so much about stolen valor (and maybe you’ve already guessed it from the title) is because it feels like I’ve been seeing all kinds of versions of it lately.
Think about Elizabeth Warren, Hilaria Baldwin, and the smattering of university professors who have recently been discovered as having lied about their race. Think about the fake bootstrap stories inherent in those lies.
Think about the social media stars who glamorize their mental illness into an interesting quirk to “raise awareness” for their disorder while insulting and questioning the personhood of people with a more severe version of that same disorder.
Think about all the people lying or exaggerating their own life stories to make themselves appear more noble or interesting or resilient. Those lies don’t just misrepresent their own lives—those lies actively harm the people who have really experienced those things.
In order to do this, those who are stealing “valor” now aren’t necessarily lying about their life experiences. Instead, they’re working hard to expand the definitions of events or experiences in one’s life which give one “valor”.
Think about how important it is in our reputational society to have “experienced” something in your life. Some hardship that gives you “character” or a “shut conversation down” card. Something that allows you to say, “you’re not allowed to talk about that because you haven’t experienced x/y/z like I have.”
Think for a moment about how the boundary lines defining medical diagnoses, assault, violence, racism, bigotry, oppression, bullying, PTSD, and others have changed in the last decade. For example, a common refrain among my colleagues in academia is “words are violence!” And I hate that I have to respond to them in words instead of just punching them in the face so they might learn the difference.
Not every definition-change has been bad, of course, but they have universally been expanded to include more “criminals” and “victims”. Why has this been so consistently the case? Words and concepts change definitions all the time, but when there’s this level of “concept leak” across a class of definitions, there’s usually something else going on. When there’s such an enormous change in the volume and scope of words in such a short period of time, it signals that those words are in some kind of political game of weaponization.
George Carlin used to bemoan a kind of “softening” of language, or “euphemisms”. He blamed this on Americans not wanting to “face the truth.” In other words, a big reason for softening the language is so that a certain class of Americans can more easily get away with literal murder (call it “capital punishment”, for example. Or, if your mileage varies on that example, how about “late-term abortion”?).
One of the examples Carlin uses is how “shell shock” changed to “battle fatigue,” which then morphed into “operational exhaustion”, before becoming “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” (and which now is primarily known by its acronym, PTSD).
Why so many changes you might reasonably wonder? And why the slow change from the potent and evocative “shell shock” to the clinical, deadened “PTSD”?
Well, I’ve heard psychologists claim that these changes happened in their field for two primary reasons; First, to lessen the societal stigma against the disorder. And second, to more accurately describe the condition.
I think it’s a bit more simple than that. “Shell shock” is jarring. It demands treatment. The public didn’t create a “stigma” against the disorder, as some psychologists try to claim. You know who did create a stigma? The elites. The politicians. The media. The military. They claimed fraud, they claimed cowardice, they claimed all kinds of things to try to dodge responsbility for the condition.
Why? Because the condition (and the language that identified it) demanded a reckoning from them, a reckoning they did not want to face. So they hid it. And after they changed the name, as George Carlin says, “the pain is completely buried under jargon. I’ll bet ya if we’d still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans mighta gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll bet ya that. I’ll bet ya that.”
—A side note: this isn’t the only reason words or commonly-recognized definitions change. Often, they change because the old term becomes misused to the point where it is useless as a descriptor for its originally intended purpose. So, for example, if a word describing a medical condition becomes watered down by people misdiagnosing their own behavior, then the medical condition might have to change its name in order to avoid confusion. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) might soon have to do something about this as a result of every slightly picky person crediting their self-diagnosed OCD for having a particular preference or compulsion.
Another example of terms becoming misused enough to warrant a change would be when they become slurs or insults. Think of the term “retarded,” which used to be the medical term for those diagnosed with what we now an “intellectual disability”. But because it became weaponized as a way to call someone stupid, the medical community stopped using the term (to be clear, this is not what happened with “shell shock”).
So, sometimes, words really do change for the good of the lower class.
But is that what’s happening now? No. Words themselves aren’t changing. Instead, we are simply re-defining the borders of familiar, politicized words. Those borders are expanding to include more and more phenomena of lesser and lesser degrees of severity.
In other words, what is happening right now is the elite class is attempting to water down the value of the lives of the lower classes by stealing their life stories for themselves.
Ask yourself: where are the “words are violence” people when they say things like that? In the comfort of their tenured offices, where they have never ever have to worry about being punched in the face for saying something so catastrophically stupid.
This isn’t contained to academia, either. Imagine being a poor black man working for pennies while serving decades on a possession sentence and hearing Colin Kaepernick (a man who was paid millions to play football in the NFL) complain that the NFL Scouting Combine is like slavery.
Imagine being a poor woman fired from her retail job because she got pregnant, listening to Jennifer Lawrence (a Hollywood millionaire) complain that she has, from time to time, been paid less than a more famous male co-star in a Hollywood film.
Imagine five, ten years from now, when some politician tries to pass some horribly racist law, and people try to call it “Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” but no one cares, because Joe Biden used those words about a relatively minor Georgia voting law which actually resulted in a historically high turnout from black voters in the election right after it passed. Oops!
In other words, these people using this language aren’t just propping themselves up; they’re screwing over the very people they’re claiming to be in a group with by watering down the meaning of words that are extremely important to the physical or mental well-being of the lower class, all so they or their pet issue can get through the door.
To be clear: I am not saying those people have nothing to complain about. It is entirely appropriate for them to complain privately about these situations. But they are hijacking political terms, historical events, social groups, medical terms, and traumatic events from the lives of less powerful people for their own gain. This is not “brave”, this is not “living your truth”, this is not “being open and honest with the public”.
This is a generational identity theft that the powerful are conducting on those who cannot counter them. They are taking something that real victims and heroes cannot get back in their lifetimes. They are claiming valor that they have not earned. They are rich and powerful frauds, trying to further validate and empower themselves through stories they have no right to. They are doing this by hijacking the terms, words, and experiences which were meant to help the lower class fight to have their most basic needs met.
After all, who is hurt by massive swaths of the public disavowing feminism because of the spoiled rotten “representation” of Hollywood women? Who is hurt by millionaire NFL players diminishing the trauma of generations of black men and women by comparing his having to sprint fast on camera to the institution of slavery?
Why, the powerless black people still affected by the fallout of slavery, the powerless women still affected by gender bigotry, of course.
So when will we start to hold these self-aggrandizing, lying frauds to account for stealing all this trauma?
If we don’t, then we have no right call ourselves allies of women, of minorities, of the poor, or of the seriously ill—we’re just the people laundering the stolen trauma of America’s most vulnerable into the hands of America’s spoiled elite.
I enjoyed reading this, even if I have some "quibbles" with your history of PTSD. Your example of academics re-defining words as violence is spot on. I have a very similar anecdote on my own Substack about that sort of bullshit.
I think that one group using the narrative frame of another group has probably always happened, there have been plenty of "Pretendians" or wannabe war heroes in history, but prior to the Internet it was easier to get away with it. American and Canadian culture is obsessed with "authenticity." We want "authentic" ethnic food (that meets our pre-formed expectations of what authentic ethnic food should be) and we want "authentic" items from brands with "pedigree."
The upper class(es) have their own forms of authenticity, which is why there's a difference between class and mere wealth in that strata, but there's no such thing really as an authentic middle class background. Wannabes in the middle class must subsist on whatever authenticity their families had before they became middle class. If someone doesn't have any authenticity of their own then they'll have to go find some in order to be interesting, and adopting an "authentic" origin story or narrative frame is easier than performing the labour necessary to be authentic in your own right.