Here’s another example of the bizarre lengths that people will go to to construct a personality worthy of that precious commodity, other people’s attention.
In this article from the Rocky Mountain News we meet David “Race” Bannon, Ph.D., who has written a book detailing his dashing exploits as a covert enforcer for Interpol. If the name sounds familiar, it means that you remember the cartoon series “Jonny Quest”, in which Race Bannon was the tow-headed he-man who was assigned to the protection of the adventurous and peripatetic Quest family.
According to his account, Bannon jetted about the globe, tracking down sex-slave traffickers and child pornographers. When he caught up with them, there was no prissy fussing about with Miranda rights and due process. No, he dealt with them in the manly way: lethal, hands-on, secret-agent-style badass kungfu vengeance. It’s a tough job, and it takes a tough man like Race Bannon to do it. The only problem is that it looks like he made the whole thing up. Read about it here.
It also turns out that our man faked his academic credentials as well, and that to support his claim of a South Korean doctorate, he forged a report by Educational Credential Evaluators Inc., a Milwaukee-based company that specializes in such inquiries. My favorite thing about this whole story – even though it’s all pretty great – is that the president of Educational Credential Evaluators, Inc. – a company whose sole purpose is to rate the veracity of people’s stories – is named James Frey.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.