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.