The Age of Fake

The lat­est “con­tro­versy” about the Bei­jing Olympic Games is about the cute lit­tle girl who sang “Ode to the Moth­er­land” dur­ing the Open­ing Cer­e­monies. It turns out she just lip synched for the real singer who was back­stage. Olympic offi­cials made the switch because the seven year old singer had bro­ken teeth! Wow. That’s like Charice Pem­pengco not win­ning in a local singing tilt because her com­pe­ti­tion looks bet­ter than her!

This arti­cle is from the Chicago Tri­bune.

Tell me what you think about all this.

The Age of Fake
Julia Keller

No, really: Were you upset about the Chi­nese kid who lip-synched “Ode to the Moth­er­land” dur­ing the open­ing cer­e­monies of the Olympic Games in Bei­jing? Or about the soul-stirring fire­works at the same event–many of which were, we now know, dig­i­tally inserted to make for bet­ter pictures?

Because a lot of peo­ple weren’t at all trou­bled. Pre­cious few of our fel­low cit­i­zens, when informed of the tele­vised fraud, flung their knock­off Kate Spade hand­bags to the ground and stomped on them in exas­per­a­tion, or smacked a fist against their Botox-benumbed fore­heads in mute protest at this appalling lack of respect for the true, the real, the authentic.

Most peo­ple, it seems, just mut­tered, “Whatever.”

Because we live in the Age of Fake. Wait, there’s more: We live in the Age of Fake (And, Like, Your Point Is?).

So much of what we encounter is rigged, tarted up, tricked out–and we don’t much care. The fix is in. And frankly, we seem to sort of like it that way.

We live in an era of the fake photo (“Pho­to­shop­ping” is not only a new verb, but an accepted prac­tice), of the fake mem­oir, of fake blogs with names such as “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.” We live in a time of fake real­ity shows, of fake resumes, of fake home-run records (pag­ing Barry Bonds), of fake rep­u­ta­tions ( John Edwards, devoted hus­band), of fake stunts in big movies. (With­out computer-generated action scenes to keep them astir, sum­mer block­busters might have had to return to that hope­lessly retro ele­ment known as–hold onto your pith hel­mets, girls and boys!–dialogue.)

And now comes the rev­e­la­tion that the cute lit­tle girl who sang her way into the world’s heart at the open­ing cer­e­monies actu­ally … didn’t. That is, 9-year-old Lin Miaoke was there, all right, and it looked as if she were belt­ing out the tune, but the pipes belonged to seven-year-old Yang Peiyi.

The prob­lem with Peiyi? Crooked teeth, accord­ing to pub­lished reports.

But few peo­ple seem riled by the switcheroo. Nor was there much of an out­cry after the 2006 Games when, the Asso­ci­ated Press reminded us, it was revealed that Luciano Pavarotti had lip-synched his aria.

Fake doesn’t seem to bother us much any­more. Fake is an accepted part of life. Fake sells.

It’s true that some of the fak­ery does kick up a fuss–remember James Frey and his pub­lic flog­ging at the hands of Oprah Win­frey, when his book “A Mil­lion Lit­tle Pieces” was dis­cov­ered to be largely fic­tional? Yet our out­rage appar­ently has a short shelf life: Frey is back in a big way. He recently pub­lished a long novel called “Bright Shiny Morning.”

It’s also true that Amer­i­cans have always had a bit of a soft spot for fast-talking shys­ters, charm­ing con men and charis­matic huck­sters such as Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” the 1957 musi­cal about a glo­ri­ously fake band leader. And crit­ics, don’t for­get, are always decry­ing canned laugher in sit­coms, but TV audi­ences have been quite com­fort­able with it for decades.

But there’s a new tol­er­ance for–even cel­e­bra­tion of–the fake. Two recently pub­lished books make the point. “Can You Ever For­give Me?” (Simon & Schus­ter) is Lee Israel’s account of how and why she faked let­ters from famous people–Noel Cow­ard, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks–and sold them to deal­ers. “The Man Who Made Ver­meers” (Har­court) by Jonathan Lopez is about the famous art forger, Han van Meegeren–who not only faked paint­ings, but faked his story about fak­ing the paint­ings and became a legend.

In his new essay col­lec­tion, “The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authen­tic­ity” (River­head), Richard Todd writes about “the very feel­ing of unre­al­ity” that seems to be afoot in today’s world, the sense that we have become hope­lessly dis­as­so­ci­ated from the real, the actual. “Our inter­est in sin­cer­ity,” he writes, “has occurred in waves–like much cul­tural his­tory, it’s both cycli­cal and cumu­la­tive, like a wheel turn­ing, show­ing dif­fer­ent sides of itself … It is true that life has few gifts (to give or receive) more grat­i­fy­ing than unfeigned laugh­ter or surprise.”

Or the inno­cent voice of a child, float­ing over a packed sta­dium and into the liv­ing rooms of peo­ple all around the world, her radi­ant face a sym­bol of sim­ple truth and hon­esty and–

Um … Never mind.