The Olympic Games are allowing China to try its hand at shaping the way it is perceived on the world stage.
To portray the desired image, the Chinese have banned unsightly protests, arrested dissenters and even closed factories and restricted traffic for months in advance of the games to try to temporarily reduce the amount of smog to levels that won't kill the competing athletes. Human-rights offenses, forced abortion and involuntary sterilization as a form of government-enforced birth control are swept under the rug in favor of spectacle and nationalism in the battle for the medals.
But not all that glitters is gold and not all you see on TV is real. The Olympic hosts put on a spectacular fireworks show at the opening ceremonies, only to have it come out later that portions of the fireworks you saw on television were not real at all -- they were computer-generated images.
The large footprints across the sky weren't seen by the audience on the ground in Beijing, only by those watching the spliced-in footage at home. Chinese officials claim they had assumed their attempts at smog reduction would not be sufficient to allow them to show all the firework effects they wanted to. They had been working on the CGI fireworks for almost a year.
Also during the opening ceremony, a cute 9-year-old Chinese girl named Lin Miaoke sang "Ode to the Motherland." Except she didn't -- the video was of her, but the voice was not. She was lip-synching. The actual singer was a 7-year-old named Yang Peiyi, whose voice was good enough to listen to, but her face was deemed not pretty enough to be broadcast.
Of course, China doesn't have a monopoly on fakery; it just has prominence because it's hosting the Olympics. Many of us know from watching good old American reality TV that "reality" is merely a facsimile of genuineness.
Once upon a time, authenticity was considered to be the purview of the very young. Children were considered to be innocent and genuine in their expressions of emotion, not yet understanding the need for social deceit. But this age of innocence is continually eroded, with 7-year-olds faking it, and the counterfeiting continues to extend ever further back toward birth.
In an arresting example of this redefining of reality and loss of innocence back in the United States, MSNBC recently reported on a New York City salon that serves preteens. The owner is quoted as saying, "Kids should begin waxing at 6 years old."
By kids, of course, she means "girls," as there is no drive to have young boys subjected to similarly painful beauty rituals. There seems to be no childhood left, and the fakery begins in kindergarten. Children have long been socialized to mercilessly torment one another for any sign of being different, such as leg hair or unwaxed eyebrows.
Now that puberty starts ever earlier and children derive their reality from watching television, they are taught what girls are supposed to look like -- plastic and smooth, with no offensive reminders of humanity.
The salon owner doesn't think it's strange that 6-year-old girls should want hairs ripped out of their bodies. She doesn't think it's worrisome that a mother brought in her pre-elementary-school-age daughter and demanded that her back be waxed because the mother was embarrassed by her daughter's hair.
The relentless drive to conform or be punished isn't questioned. The global focus on the surface, from the Olympics all the way down to kindergarten, makes for generations of pliable, self-conscious consumers with low self-esteem.
Despite the disappointment and disillusionment that accompanies fakery exposed and innocence trampled, there is one bright spot this week. Two men, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, have announced that they have discovered a dead American Bigfoot in Georgia! They found the 7-foot, 500-pound, fur-covered corpse in July, and under the watchful eyes of several living Bigfoot, they scooped it up and rushed it to a box freezer, where it has been kept on ice ever since. They planned to share DNA analysis and photographs with selected members of the media.
Although the one photograph circulated to date looks like a rotting rug with a set of dentures, they have assured reporters that it's the real deal. They've enlisted the aid of Tom Biscardi, chief executive of an operation named Searching for Bigfoot Inc. Biscardi is confident that the corpse is really one of the elusive Bigfoot and has given tissue samples for analysis to a research scientist from the University of Minnesota.
By the time this column goes to press, there should have been a news conference proving the existence of Bigfoot once and for all. I, for one, have every confidence that it will turn out to be exactly what we expect it to be. That New York salon owner may have her work cut out for her.
Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.