What can you say about this?
Bad craziness in southern Illinois.
Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper was dead, and the sergeant's little girl--a precocious, blond-haired child they'd grown to love--was now an orphan.Talk about your creative propaganda. Can't wait to hear more about who was behind this travesty.
They all knew that Kodee Kennings' mother had died when Kodee was about 5. The little girl's fears and frustrations about her father being in harm's way had played out on the pages of the Daily Egyptian for nearly two years, in gut-wrenching letters fraught with misspellings, innocent observations and questions about why Daddy wasn't there to chase the monsters from under her bed.
It turns out Daddy didn't exist. And neither did Kodee.
More here. (once there, click on the links too.)
**UPDATE** The Dispatch/Argus has a piece on this in today's edition which sheds a bit more light on this tangled story. It appears it was begun as a ruse to further a former Daily Egyptian editor's career. The strange part is that they actually recruited a man and a small girl to play the parts of these ficticious characters by telling them they were playing parts in a movie. Too weird.
posted by The Inside Dope @ 8/26/2005
3 comments
3 Comments:
As if this travesty in Iraq, and its repercussions at home, weren't fraught with enough seismic emotions, we hear about this fraud-paganda (my own awkward coining) in the Illinois Daily Egyptian (hands down the most improbable name for a paper I've ever heard).
There are no rules in love and war, and we're seeing clear, horrid evidence of this adage proving true.
Well, the cat's out of the bag, we're all tired of whipping Pat Robertson, so I guess it's time to line-up in front of the Daily Egyptian.
Times like this bring out the best and worst in people. It's just too bad witnessing the best doesn't sufficiently shadow the worst. I'm going to back to my old thinking that humanity is simply an Artificial Intelligence experiment -- gone wrong, gone sorely wrong.
Matt -- you have to know a bit about the region to get the name. Southern Illinois is often known as "Little Egypt" due to a number of towns named for cities in Egypt (Thebes and Cairo are the two that leap to mind). Southern Illinois University calls its sports teams the Salukis, after the dogs that guarded egyptian temples. They therefore call the college paper the Daily Egyptian.
Make sense now?
There's a further story about this in today's Dispatch. Evidently, one of the two people who concocted it was a former editor of the Daily Egyptian, which is the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University.
As to why the southern tip of Illinois is called "Little Egypt", I happened to do a bit of research on the subject a year or so ago due to the term appearing in the lyric of a favorite song.
There's no definiitive reason for the appelation, though Cairo, Thebes, and Karnak are named after Egyptian cities.
The area is truly more a part of the south than the north, more linked in culture and politics to neighboring Kentucky and Missouri than to the rest of Illinois.
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