The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1895-06-04
FAKES AND THEIR USES.

| IL,
whole truth and nothing but the truth
so help him God, has right to kick OF
fakes. But the man who can wall
through the rich groves Of mentality
and pick off wormy plum occasion
ally and acknowledge that nature ha:
played poke on him, and laugh Over
| it, likes to meet the gladstone fake anC
shake hands with it.
The fake is cosmopolitan. 1t varies
in style in different places, but its gen
erous appearance is much the same
| No one but numskull will mistake il
| for the truth. The fake in New York
consists in some irregular and idiotit
story about the Astors or the Goulds
If some newspaper writer has a thrill
in his imagination and creates the pos
sibility of tramp being found in an
Astors bed, he at once sets it down as
q fact and it is sent broadcast to the
world. The same thing would never
do as fake from Oklahoma. In Ok
lahoma the fake must kill somebody
A fake depicting the most romantic,
but not tragic, situation from Okla
homa would be refused by the reading
public. But if the faker will carefully
create a cowboy fight and kill eighteen
or twenty men, three ponies and an
Indian squaw and add that further
trouble is expected" the dear public
will glue its eyes to the piece Of news
and read with avidity. In South Caro-
lima thousands of negroes are killed
off annually by this harmless system,
and the northern readers grow hot with
Indignation. The northern readers
want to grow hot, and the negroes who
are killed, were not hurt and the fake
acts with great mercy and potency.
Kansas could never send out "tele-
scope fake" This fake belongs to
Washington, D. c., and California. Ii
consists in the discovery of a new star.
Every few months a new star bulges
forth from the sky in someone's imag-
ination and IS at once announced. Those
at it, and those who have not go out
in the twilight and try to locate the
star. Wbereupon they don't do it.
Then there are the European war
takers. They are kept up at immense
cost by the large newspapers to scare
up war in Eourope. This they sue
coed admirably in doing. The war as
carried on by the takers is much prefer
able TO the war as conducted by J.
Caesar and y. Bonaparte. In the fake
war no one is killed. Just at present
the fake is killing off General Marti of
Cuba, before large audience in which
is included General Marti himself.
The public has come to know and
love the fake. 1t is fiction and fiction
is always amusing. interesting and re-
heving. The actual tragedy admits
of no relief. In fiction the death of the
heroine creates sorrow that dissipates
before the thought that the whole thing
IS just story. anyway.
History teens with fakes. Homer's
two great poems We're fakes. No one
can prove that Troy actually existed.
The story of Romulus and Relnus suck
ing she wolf sprang from the imagin-
alton OF some Roman writer who had
n tendency toward natural history
William Tell never shot an apple off
his sons head, and that fake was
brushing around in textbooks before
newspapers existed.
So the fake is liable to stay with US.
on the strict grounds OF truth 1t is
bad thing. AS warning or a lesson
ii is perhaps as Serviceable as the truth
For ''spake He by parallels. and with
out parallels spake He nothing"