“’Law, Brer Tarrypin!’ sez Brer Fox, sezee, ‘you ain’t see no trouble yit. Ef you wanter see sho’ nuff trouble, you des oughter go ‘lone me; I’m de man w’at kin show you trouble, sezee.” (Nights with Uncle Remus – Joel Chandler Harris).
Let’s, right from the outset, make one thing clear. I detest persons who steal for others honor and credit for deeds - including heroic ones – actually done by someone else. The reader may want to remember that, so I remind him that I said this in the first line of this essay.
I detest, too, the “perfumed prince” who shows up on television before a national audience – to testify before congress, for instance – wearing a chestful of infantile merit badges, sometimes not one of which amounts to a Boy Scout Merit Badge in value that has to do with what it means. Often all but one or two of these “ribbons” says merely that the wearer was someplace. The four stars on this wannabe Leonidas were all too often earned in a college classroom or while training to fight - not fight.
There are four medals (and their ribbons) which connote valor: the Bronze Star with “V for Valor,” the Silver Star, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Medal of Honor. Services other than the U.S. Army have medals equivalent to the DSC, medals which include the Navy Cross. I sincerely respect those medals and ribbons, but as one who doesn’t festoon his car with bumpers stickers or wear “message” tee-shirts, I haven’t much time for men who wear their honor on their sleeve – or chest. When it is a woman who shows up wearing a uniform sporting a "stack" of ribbons, I want to puke.
But this is about “Stolen Valor,” and The Stolen Valor Act of 2006 (18 US Code Section 704). As someone who has made a lifelong study of the science of propaganda – which is a form of lying – I see what is going on here. So – unless we are even stupider as a society and nation than I have reason to believe - does the Marine Colonel who this morning on FoxNews pontificated indignantly about a court having ruled the Stolen Valor Act of 2006 unconstitutional.
Trust me, this isn’t about "stolen valor." The government of the United States is not only arguably the biggest liar in human history, it is the biggest thief ever in history of the honor and credit – “valor." This unctuously phony Stolen Valor Act is about propaganda enhancement, a means of silencing “enemies of state” – anyone who disagrees with our colossally criminal, corporately owned and administered, government.
Who controls the record upon which everything concerning this kind of “valor” depends?
Let us take an example – me. In 1988, the United States District Court for Colorado ruled "quashing" my suit for disclosure of personal records under the much propagandist-vaunted (intending the obvious – to make it appear that we have that “open government” spoken so much about) Freedom of Information Act. The court ruled that my records - which included military ones – were exempt from disclosure under the “national security” exemption. “To do otherwise,” the court ruled, “would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States.”
Yeah - right!
So why would the U.S. Department of Justice (retch) – that’s the United States Government who wants to protect the valorous – refuse to make public a soldier’s records? Why, for further instance, would the Department of the Army refuse to provide the Social Security Administration with record of a soldier’s (me, again) service? Why, at length, would the United States and its Army finally say that “for purposes of Social Security and veterans’ benefits, the Department of the Army concedes (my emphasis) that (my name – I can’t say more, it’s now “classified”) had military service"?
That word “concedes” isn’t a medal or ribbon, but if it were, it would be the only one I would wear.
On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t. Gee-gaws are just not my “thing.”
If we want to talk about “stolen valor,” why don’t we speak of the “valor” of having lived a long life during which a man not once – not one, single time – ever asked anything of his country; of a man for whom his country never meant anything but a blood-sucking, life-burdening parasite? Having paid or been directly and solely responsible for payment of literally millions of taxes, having killed and wounded, and having been wounded for the country’s benefit, he is rewarded in the way of things pinned on his persons with nothing more than more of society’s leaching parasites. And those parasites include, of course, the biggest parasite of them all - the federal government itself.
Who “steals” valor worst, those who claim to have done what they have not, or those who simply erase the record of what another has done?
In 1977, the United States of America destroyed by way of its Gestapo Einsatzgruppe IRS my business, my marriage and family, and my financial credit. Everything I had worked all my then forty-one years to build. In 1985, when I had recovered financially, remarried, and returned to business, they did it all again, this time not only taking massively effective steps to assure that I would never again be gainfully employed, but driving one of my children to three attempts at suicide. More, fearful that I would testify at 1986 hearings having to do with the first of several cynically propagandist (when passed, the law was turned over for enforcement to those it purported to control) “Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights” legislation, the government pursued me relentlessly about the country, finally driving me to the wilderness in order to escape continual harassment, harassment that included several outright attempts at murder.
While I sent literally scores of letters, boxes of proof in the form of records, recordings and video tapes, and more to all the “news and information” media, to members of the Congress, and to law enforcement officials, not one scintilla of information concerning what was happening every “leaked” to the public. That, as I’ve already related, included a U.S. District Court ruling protecting the cover-up. How's that for a "free press?"
How’s that for “Stolen Valor?”
Concealing the truth, in the estimation of most reasonably educated and thinking people, is a form of lying. More, the U.S. Government, particularly in the persons of the U.S. Congress and President, represent certainly and before the wide world the most infamous collection of liars on the planet Earth. Now we have in the Stolen Valor Act a law that would, in the fashion that the Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights was entrusted by the U.S. Congress for enforcement to IRS, entrust determination and oversight of who is lying to the U.S. Government.
If there is anyone who can offer a proposition more deceitfully, more propagandistically ludicrous than that, he can only be a member of Congress or the U.S. Government otherwise. A federal judge, for instance.
In the Ministry of Truth of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. In the Ministry of Truth there is also a large underground, one containing huge incinerators where documents are destroyed after they are put down “memory holes.” In today's version of Oceania, those "memory holes" are all too often courts like the U.S. District Court for Colorado.
I was quite surprised in that regard when I didn’t find in the District Court for Colorado’s ruling reference to the Ministry of Truth’s primary need and purpose, that of rewriting history and changing facts to fit for propaganda effect federal government doctrine. The court’s “irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States,” of course was so close to the Orwell’s description of the Ministry of Truth’s need to maintain the illusion of Big Brother’s absolute righteousness that I was satisfied. No mistake there. The court's ruling created a "memory hole," all right - it just used those "other words."
Plausible denial, anyone?
Big Brother in Washington, D.C., of course, must seem eternally right and powerful, and if anyone should ever happen to figure out what the U.S. Tax Code says, IRS and its Congressional overseers would no longer be dictators.
Want to talk about “Stolen Valor?” “Ef you wanter see sho’ nuff ‘stolen valor,’ I’m de man w’at kin show you stolen valor,” sezee.
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