A society of doping, dubbing and duping
Rita Papazian
Published: Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Are you as tired of the lying, conniving and manipulation around us as much as I am? Where is reality when even Reality TV is not reality? Where is reality when a winner may not really be a winner or when a singer may or may not be singing live? Are we done yet? I am.

What's real and not real or what is true and not true certainly has come into play recently: the doping of Lance Armstrong, the duping of Manti Te'o and the possible lip-synching of Beyonce during her singing of the national anthem at the president's Inauguration.

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner, stated he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, and had blood transfusions to increase his stamina during the world-cycling competition.

Te'o, Notre Dame's star linebacker, sat down with Katie Couric and chronicled months of deception that reportedly was the mastermind of a casual friend pretending to be a young woman named Lennay Kekua, who allegedly engaged in an online romance with Te'o, who never met her because she never existed.

We learn that the fabricated young woman had a car accident, survived the accident and then was diagnosed with leukemia and died.

Don't shed tears for remember she never existed to begin with. Yet, when Te'o, a runner-up for the Heisman Trophy, learned that the young woman never existed, he didn't come clean with Notre Dame officials and became complicit with the hoax that the university, unknowingly seized upon to use for good publicity for the university and its football team.

In a recent interview, Rick Reilly a commentator for ESPNsports.com said he believed Te'o's near win for the Heisman Trophy was fueled by sympathy. Also, Reilly believes that Te'o will probably be drafted by the NFL in the first round, but he questions whether or not he is ready to run an NFL defensive when he has shown how gullible and naïve he can be. The Te'o story is not really over. There may be other aspects to the story that we don't know about. You may recall, he even lied to his parents and told them that he had met Lennay Kekua, the fictitious person, whose voice someone dubbed on a number of voicemails.

We go from duping to dubbing with the next reaIity show, Beyonce's singing of the National Anthem. Did she or did she not lip synch the "Star-Spangled Banner"? Was she mouthing the words to the Anthem while a pre-recording of her singing the Anthem was broadcast to the thousands of people in attendance and watching on TV.

To date, Beyonce has not acknowledged that her singing was pre-recorded.

The Marine Corp Band spokesman did say that all musical performances are pre-recorded as a precaution against the unforeseen and at the last minute allegedly it was Beyonce's decision to go with the pre-recorded track with the Marine Band playing live.

Come Sunday, no doubt the public will wonder if Beyonce will be singing live during her half-time performance . In past Super Bowl half-time shows, the Black-Eyed Peas performed live while Madonna performed to a pre-recording.

What is disappointing in all of this, is the deception, from the severity of Armstrong's doping and duping of the American public to the insignificant possibility of Beyonce's lip-synching. In between, I find Manti Te'o's gullibility in the hoax played on him a bit scary. Are our youth today that vulnerable, gullible and naïve? His father sums up his son's actions as "a 21-year-old trying to act like a man."

Isn't he a senior ready to graduate Notre Dame University? Maybe as a star linebacker he learned how to buck heads just too many times.

I remember a few years ago my nephew asked me if I had ever turned over a package of carrots in the supermarket. If you do, you will see the true color of the carrots. When you look through the front of the cellphone bag, the carrots look very orange.

That is because in reality the cellophane in the front has an orange tint to it to make you think the carrots are that orange when in reality they are not.

Try it sometime; you'll see the difference between how the carrots look from the front of the bag as opposed to the back. Obviously this may not true with all carrot packaging, but worth a look-see. In other words, we really have to look closely to see the true color, whether it's people or produce. Or maybe, we've just become a society of duping, doping and dubbing?

Rita Papazian is a freelance writer who has covered Norwalk extensively.