Not Pretty Enough

There’s been a lot of whoo-ha about the fact that the cute little girl in the opening ceremony last Friday night was miming the words. The face behind the voice has crooked teeth and couldn’t be shown on international television.

There’s also been a bit of hullabaloo about the fact that not all the fireworks were real but digitally generated.

Maybe another naïveté has been uncovered here. Do we not realise that every day in every form of media we are looking at faces, bums, hands, hair, teeth, toenails and armpits of people who were chosen because most of the others (like me) weren’t pretty enough to do the job? We are swimming in a culture that spends inordinate amounts of money to put a face and a style to their product. What happened in the opening ceremony was just one incident. Don’t get all hot-headed about one little Chinese girl if you conveniently ignore every other form of advertising swamping you.

As for the fireworks, who cares? It was about entertainment and visual spectacle. It looked good and we went wow-wee!! (Well my friend Sarah from Mudgee would’ve said exactly that!) I think if we knew how much of our world these days was digitally enhanced we’d be shocked.

The plain truth is that most of the world isn’t pretty enough for our palettes these days. We’ve been spoilt by the airbrush and Photoshop.

We don't think this is real