Almost two hundred years ago, John Keats began one of the most famous poetic couplets of the Romantic era with the line, “Truth is beauty, and beauty truth.” Over the years critics have argued about what Keats meant, as indeed philosophers through the ages have debated the meaning of Truth. We live in an age in which distinguishing between truth and fiction, reality and fantasy is becoming increasingly more difficult. We are no longer certain if the person we are watching on TV or in the movies is real, or is partially, or even completely, computer generated. In the same way that images are manipulated for us, facts are also manicured, redesigned, and rearranged, so that along with the images, we are no longer certain what actually happened. This is the world that we live in, and we are realists and accept it for what it is. Yet, as hardened as we are, there have recently been two events that have caused us to pause and reassess the meaning of truth in the age in which we live. By now everyone knows the story of the two small Chinese girls and their role in the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. In this case ‘beauty was not truth.' As a live audience of 91,000, including 80 heads of state, joined by a billion people in front of TV sets around the world, watched, 9-year-old Lin Miaoke became an instant celebrity as she sang “Ode to the Motherland.” The world was captivated and lost its heart to her as it was equally stunned by more than three hours of spectacular music, dancing and pyrotechnics that cost over $100 million. And then within a day, the news was out that Lin Miaoke was lip-synching and the real voice was that of 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, the winner of a nationwide competition, who at almost the last minute was deemed by a senior member of the Chinese politburo not to be pretty enough to be the face of China to the world. It seems as though her baby teeth, a bit crooked as some children's are, cost her the chance to have her face as well as her voice presented to the world. As the world gasped at these revelations and its heart now went out in a completely different way to two young children who had been manipulated for political ends, Chinese officials with an “it was just one of those things” nonchalance made references to the need to uphold the “national interest.” In an attempt at damage control, they offered the explanation that the opening ceremony was a team effort just like a sporting event, and that sometimes some players were better than others and had to sit on the bench while their teammates played the game. The analogy was as weak as it was inapt: As a team player you may well be required to sit on the bench, but your teammate does not go on the field to fight the opponent using your legs. Furthermore, it was disclosed that a part of the pyrotechnic fireworks had been digitally enhanced for the world's television screens. Yes, of course, there were real fireworks, but a studio had worked for almost a year to reproduce computer images of them so that part of what you were seeing had been engineered to look better than it might have had it just been left up to, well, reality. Then later, the 56 children in brightly colored costumes representing the 56 Chinese ethnic groups turned out not to be children from those groups even though the official opening ceremony program described them as such. It was all a bit like the lady in the Victorian music hall song who after the ball took out her glass eye, put her false teeth in water and kicked her wooden leg into the corner of the room. Still, why are we surprised? Hollywood has been bending reality for years. Film stars have been having their names, noses, and personal narratives altered almost since the invention of celluloid. We no longer think of it as deceit. But what is different in the case of the Olympics opening ceremony is the immense scale of the deception, the enormity of the risk taken, and the audacity of those who thought they could get away with it undiscovered, as well, of course, as the fact that innocent children were used as pawns in the deceit. No matter how we attempt to rationalize it, it does modify our definition of truth, and in the process truth somehow loses a bit of its value. At almost the same time that Lin Miaoke was innocently mouthing Yang Peiyi's words in Beijing, on the other side of the world, another kind of truth was being exposed on a scale that, although different, was equally breathtaking. John Edwards, the erstwhile candidate to be the Democratic Party's nominee for US president, finally was run to ground by the media and forced to admit to a prolonged extramarital affair in 2006 with a campaign worker and to confess that he had been lying about it for almost a year. Questions were raised as to when the relationship had begun, if the worker owed her job in Edwards' campaign to the relationship, when Edward's wife Elizabeth knew, if the woman was being paid ‘hush money,' and whether Edwards had fathered her child. None of this would be of great interest and would hardly be worthy of inclusion in an afternoon soap opera except for the fact that this is the man who fashioned for himself a glib, fresh-faced image with a message of ending the divisiveness of the Two Americas , that of the rich minority and the poor majority. Exuding “family values,” he stood with his cancer-stricken wife during his campaign and vowed to continue his fight to realize the dream of a better America for the poor and working classes. Like the Chinese politburo members who decided to use a little girl to cheat billions, how did Edwards have the audacity to think that he could run a presidential campaign with all of that baggage hidden in his closet just waiting to come out? Unlike Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi who are innocent children doing what they were told to do, no one forced Edwards to run for president, let alone to carve out a family oriented position that was clearly at odds with what he knew to be true. And what of those who worked for him, donated to him and voted for him, and not least those who believed in him and to whom he became a champion – the working class and the poor? Are they just dupes like the billions of us who watched the Olympics ceremony? What is it that makes these men and women think that they can get away with it? And what is it that drives them: the risk? The danger of being caught? Or as scientists have recently discovered that they may be able to bend light so that objects become “invisible,” do these people think they can bend reality so that we will see something which is really not there? And what effect does it have on us, and on our perception of the Truth? Surely the next time that we see a spectacular ceremony of any type we will stop to wonder how much of it is real, and if we don't already, we will begin to question the veracity of all public figures. When the truth is devalued in such spectacular fashion, it devalues us all. We all become a little more hardened, callous, and cynical. And our world becomes a little less beautiful. However, while the Olympics ceremony and Edwards revelations may have tarnished the beauty of truth, it may equally have reminded us that ‘Truth is beauty.' __
