Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 03:38:11 -0700

To: Recipient List Suppressed:;

Here is another tragic death of a young, silicone implanted woman. Below are several articles on her death ... and her wild and hard living life. The stories below and some of the photos are not for the easily offended ... in Britain, she and silicone were often linked. May God give strength to the four young daughters she leaves.

The BBC's Duncan Kennedy

"The body of Paula Yates was found in the bedroom of her home"

Sunday, 17 September, 2000, 14:15 GMT 15:15 UK

Paula Yates found dead

Paula Yates pictured in London earlier this year

Former television presenter Paula Yates has been found dead at her London home.

Scotland Yard said officers were called to an address in St Luke's Mews, Notting Hill, west London, on Sunday by an ambulance crew.

"The body was found in a bedroom and the cause of death will not be known until the post mortem," said a spokesman.

Miss Yates' solicitor, Anthony Burton, has confirmed her death.

Her former husband and the father of three of her daughters, Sir Bob Geldof, said in a statement: "We are all so sad. The loss for all the children is insupportable."

Speaking of the family's "pain" at Paula's death, the statement added: "It doesn't require much imagination to understand the pain. Please do nothing to add to that.

Sir Bob Geldof has called for the family to be left alone in their grief "Leave them [the children] with their loss and Paula with her dignity.

"Thanks, we appreciate it. Bob."

Paula's mother, Heller Thornton-Bosment, speaking from her home in southern France, said she was "devastated" after learning of her daughter's death.

"This has come as a terrible shock to everyone," she said. "I am waiting for calls from London to find out exactly what has happened."

A forensic medical examiner at the scene confirmed that Miss Yates was dead at 1130BST.

Police have cordoned off the exclusive street where the body was found.

Pop personality

The 40-year-old first made her name presenting Channel 4 pop music show The Tube in 1982. More recently, she was a co-presenter on The Big Breakfast on the same channel.

After her marriage to Boomtown Rats singer-turned-businessman Bob Geldof ended, she became involved with INXS singer Michael Hutchence.

Miss Yates remained Hutchence's partner from 1994 until he was found hanged in a hotel room in Sydney in 1997.

Paula Yates with daughter Tiger Lily at Michael Hutchence's funeral

She always contended that he did not commit suicide, but that he died by accident playing a sex game.

Last year she tried to challenge an Australian coroner's finding that Hutchence had committed suicide.

In February this year it was announced she was signing up to be an agony aunt for Aura magazine under former Sunday Express editor Eve Pollard.

"Paula was always so full of life," Eve Pollard told BBC News 24. "She had had a tragic time but was coming out of it. She adored her children and they will find it hardest of all to recover from this."

In 1998, Ms Yates learned that Opportunity Knocks presenter Hughie Green was her biological father, not the broadcaster, Jess Yates, who had brought her up.

She was recently treated for depression at the Priory clinic in Roehampton, south west London.

She had three children with Bob Geldof - Fifi Trixibelle, 17, Peaches Honeyblossom, 10, and Pixie, seven.

Miss Yates also leaves a four-year-old daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, by Michael Hutchence.

Her former solicitor, Mark Stephens, told BBC News 24: "Whatever the circumstances, which are still unclear, our hearts have to go out to the children."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Silicone implants: what's all the fuss about, asks Jo Sedley

Making mountains out of mole hills

Here is a 1990s paradox. Mattel, the makers of the ever-popular plastic Barbie doll, are planning to give her a more 'realistic' figure: in other words, a smaller chest. Meanwhile real-life girlies such as Pamela Anderson Lee, Melinda Messenger and Paula Yates are going under the knife to give themselves an altogether less 'realistic' shape, with larger-than-life silicone boobs. Why?

An estimated two million women in the UK and the USA have undergone breast augmentation surgery. Many do it to feel more confident about and satisfied with their appearance. For some, breast enlargement can also be an astute financial move. There is gold in them there hills, and it is more than likely that once somebody like Pandora Peaks has made her mega bucks revealing her mega bust she will have the implants removed.

For the first time it is possible to get bigger, reasonably lifelike breasts. The operation costs around £4000, you can be back at home on the same day, the bruising goes after a few weeks and in the majority of cases all you are left with is a hairline scar under the breast. For women not altogether content with 'what God gave them', it all seems too good to be true.

But all is not well in silicone valley. As the popularity of breast augmentation grows, so do the fears of possible medical problems. For every picture of a smiling Melinda Messenger there seems to be a story of a woman whose health has been ruined by silicone implants. Elaine Coomber, from the Breast Implant Support Group, told me that she started suffering serious side effects just three years after she received her implants in 1976. Her health problems include crippling pain and swelling in the arms and joints, partial blindness, dizziness and fatigue.

Silicone implants have been accused of causing a wide range of health dis-orders: cancer, urinary problems, swallowing difficulties and even smaller children at birth. The most widely publicised health risk to date links silicone to connective tissue diseases (CTD) including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and also auto-immune diseases. These pathological problems are reported to occur when the silicone gel contents leak into the surrounding tissue and into the bloodstream and lymph nodes. Leaking occurs due to small amounts seeping through the silicone shell (bleeding) or to a larger extent due to a rupture.

A recent review in the Lancet medical journal about the prevalence of ruptures claimed that 'the proportion of patients who could expect to have both implants intact was 89 per cent after eight years and 51 per cent by 12 years, but only five per cent after 20 years'. (Lori Brown et al, 22 November 1997). The review described how silicone is thought to migrate to various parts of the body including the chest, ribs, upper arm, biceps, elbow and hand. This would back up Elaine Coomber's story of having lumps of silicone removed from her neck and arm.

As a result of the growing concern about the side effects of breast implants, some women who have already had the op are beginning to panic. The extent of these fears is summed up by Jenny Jones, an American TV chat show host with breast implants: 'Not a day goes by that I don't wonder how my exposure to silicone is affecting my health. With every ache, every pain, the question arises: Is it the silicone?'

In the USA, silicone survivors' support groups successfully lobbied the US government Food and Drug Administration for a ban on silicone gel implants for breast augmentation operations, which came into force in April 1992. They have also successfully sued the silicone implant manufacturers for compensation, obtaining over $4.25 billion in pay-outs. In the UK, New Labour health minister Baroness Jay is leading an inquiry into the safety of silicone, with special emphasis on the feelings and stories of the silicone support groups.

Silicone's days, it seems, are numbered and for the small-chested women who desperately want a larger bosom, the future looks bleak. But how scientific is the basis for a ban on silicone implants?

For all the furore about silicone, thorough and extensive scientific research - 23 studies to date - have, on the whole, found no proof that breast implants lead to illness. A report of the largest study to date in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that: 'The major contribution of this and other observational analytical studies has been to exclude large risks of connective tissue diseases following breast implants.' (Hennekens et al, 28 February 1996). This study did find a small risk, but the authors admitted that this finding was dubious due to the high chance of the overemphasis of symptoms and over reporting by affected women.

The high rupture rates of breast implants that were quoted in the Lancet review last year have been questioned by other experts who point out that these figures were taken from a highly selective sample - women who wanted their implants removed. Other studies have found much lower rupture rates of five per cent (letters, New England Journal of Medicine, 10 October 1996).

In fact, the weight of scientific and medical evidence has been ignored, especially in America. As Dr Deborah Del De Junco puts it, 'despite the remarkable agreement showing little to no increased risk of the established CTDs the breast implant controversy has gained its own inexorable momentum' (Journal of the American Medical Association, 28 May 1997). Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine argues that 'there are many individual stories of CTD developing after the placement of breast implants but these reports alone are not enough. Anecdotes do not constitute evidence that the implants caused the disease' (Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case, 1996).

When the evidence that silicone implants can be harmful is so scant, how has the campaign against silicone implants gathered enough momentum to bring about a ban? One important reason, it seems to me, is that the exaggerated medical fears about silicone provide a convenient means of support for those who really object to implants on moral grounds: they simply believe that it is ethically wrong for women to enlarge their breasts. Not everybody appreciates the 'man made' curves of a Pamela Anderson Lee or Melinda Messenger. Feminist campaigners in particular have led the way in condemning supermodels, fashion magazines and plastic surgeons for perpetuating an 'ideal' image of beautiful women, and have insisted that women should learn to be content with 'the way they are'. In opting for artificially bigger breasts, they argue, women are giving in to pressure and conforming to a stereotyped image of the big-boobed sex object, created by a male-dominated society.

In her influential book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf compares the effects of boosting your boobs to the eighteenth century procedure of clitoridectomy. To her, women are not making autonomous choices about ways to improve their looks, they are being pres-surised into surgery: 'modern surgeons claim they make women feel better, and that, no doubt, is true; Victorian middle class women had so internalised the idea of their sexuality as diseased that the gynaecologists [removing the clitoris] were "answering their prayers.".' In other words, society forces women to mutilate themselves for the benefit of men, and plastic surgeons, far from responding to women's choices, are simply playing their role in perpetuating the 'beauty myth'.

There is now often an assumption that women are being manipulated into self-mutilation by the selfish will of men. Early last year, rumours that the bad boy of British football, Paul Gasgoigne, had insisted his wife have breast enlargements were met with outrage by women's health groups. This gave the campaigners an opportunity to get the entire Rangers team (not normally seen as a feminist stronghold) to sign footballs to raise money for the anti-silicone implants campaign. But can women's decisions to increase their cup size so easily be put down to the whims of bullying men?

In 1996 alone, 5000 women in the UK had the breast augmentation operation - surely 5000 men were not responsible. Meanwhile, Sheryl Gasgoigne's part in the decision to go ahead with the operation was ignored. (Given her new media career, it seems unlikely she will be handing the implants back to Gazza as part of their divorce settlement.) It was more conven- ient to believe that this was another example of uncaring men forcing their partners to have their breasts cut open.

Other commentators offer different takes on the 'irrationality' of women who have breast implants. Jojo Moyes, a journalist on the Independent, interprets the whole thing as some sort of terrible leftover from the eighties philosophy of style over content. 'Women who have had implants don't want to hear about potential side effects in the future: they want to feel better about themselves now', she writes, condemning the 'terrible mistakes' made by women who have gone for the operation. 'They don't care if it feels a bit different; they just care that it should look perfect. If they lose a bit of sensation, have trouble breast feeding or suffer the odd sleepless night from fear, isn't that a small price to pay?' (16 September 1997) Moyes may not blame men for women's decisions, but she echoes the dim view of women's abilities to make reasonable life choices of their own.

In fact, there are many rational reasons why a woman might want silicone implants, just as there are many reasons why people feel inadequate: too fat, too thin, too small or too tall. Whatever your preference, real bosoms or bigger artificial ones, women should be allowed to have access to whatever technology is available. Some would rather have us settling for what we have been 'given'. But why should women have to settle for anything less than what they think is best for them?

There is no denying that there can be side effects to breast implants, like a hardening of the breast tissue. There are also women who are suffering from painful conditions. Whether these conditions are directly caused by silicone remains to be proven. Elaine Coomber has been recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It is uncertain whether this alone has been the cause of her health problems, or whether the problems were also related to the breast implants. Further scientific research to find real evidence continues. A useful move by all those concerned about the medical side effects of silicone would be to present women thinking about having the 'op' with as much scientific fact and evidence as possible and let them decide after weighing up the pros and cons. This would at least credit them with the intelligence to make up their own minds about their own future.

What is not useful is having the discussion on silicone turned into an emotional and irrational panic. Nor is it positive to portray women like Sheryl Gasgoigne as poor, helpless victims dominated by their husbands. This can only encourage the authorities to treat women as fragile and naive little flowers, unable to choose for themselves whether to go ahead with breast enlargements or not. Governments can then take it upon themselves to decide for us, as they have done in the USA, Canada and Australia where the use of silicone gel implants is banned whether women want them or not. Such 'victories' only reinforce the view that women are vulnerable weaklings living in fear of male disapproval, and in need of protection by big brother of the breast implant police.

I have to admit that reports that Dolly Parton has decided to have six different implants, each one increasing in size, sound bizarre and ridiculous, and in some cases it has seemed that the bigger the enhanced cup size, the smaller the natural talent. But then again we can't all sing and dance.

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Barbie Girl: 'Life in Plastic./It's Fantastic.'?

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Reproduced from LM issue 107, February 1998

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An Phoblacht/Republican News · Thursday 5 November 1998

Remembering Julie

* Children of The Troubles (Radio One)

* Leargas - An tOileanach (RTE)

* Don't Feed The Gondolas (Network 2)

* Breasts (Channel 4)

Catholics " knew their place" before 1969, so says Robin Livingstone, who shared a two bedroomed house off the Falls with his thirteen brothers and sisters and parents.

Brother of plastic bullet victim Julie Livingstone, Robin was reminiscing on Radio One's "Children of The Troubles", whose only fault lies in their desperation "to show both sides" which often blights the media.

Houses were still being used as a form of political patronage in the mid sixties, with Catholics outside the "Golden Circle" and Robin being confined to a double bed with seven of his brothers.

Livingstone had his first experiences of sectarianism when at six, he was subjected to ritual sectarian abuse "and a few wee slaps about the head'' when he went to buy Rosses lemonade for his dad - "I already knew my place. By the age of six, we didn't question it, families were apolitical, happy in their small houses, that's just the way it was''. Until " with a crash and a whoosh'' the family were petrol bombed by loyalists on 13 August 1969.

Led by "colourful character'' (as the media described him) Johnny McQuade, all "taigs'' were systematically burnt out. As an eight year old Livingstone looked on it as ``a great adventure'', until his mother began to scream at the prospect of scaling a thirty foot wall, with two year old Julie in her arms.

The family were later picked off the street by a wealthy businessman, after coming under fire with bricks and bottles from the 'B' Specials (" with their Darth Vader outfits'') and were later feted by Protestants with baskets of biscuits and bread - "their humanity kicked in, but they still wouldn't discuss events''.

The family duly arrived in Twinbrook, where baby of the clan, Julie was murdered in 1981 by "a Brit who decided to take a pot shot at her'' while returning from the shops for her mammy.

The British propaganda machine portayed Julie as "a rioter from a leading republican family'' and true to form The Sunday Times claimed her death was due to " a thin skull''.

Predictably Julie was later proved innocent and no soldier was ever taken to task over the murder, and Julie's mother retreated into a corner underneath a photo of her child and " knitted until she died''.

Four years into the peace process, the Brits are still firing plastic bullets and Catholics are still being intimidated and shot, but it's republicans who are supposed to decommission.

Boobs is a topic most Irish shy away from and the majority of us lack the necessary body confidence to go topless, men included, but then again maybe our climate isn't very conducive to the practice.

"Breasts'' was all the rage on Channel 4 last Tuesday with women of all ages discussing everything from 28B's to blossoming cleavages - did you know that big breasts were all the go in the fifties and that small breasts didn't make the breakthrough until the eighties, with nineties has seen the return of cleavage, inspired no doubt by Eva Herzogovic's Wonderbra.

Silicone implants have become fashionable with Paula Yates among their ranks, but they have also led to severe problems, including severe infection, breaking or leaking into the body.

An increasing number of women, particularly in America, feel the need to dish out thousands of dollars to get the perfect size, and thereby use their breasts as "a power tool''.

The most serious aspect of this issue must surely be the increasing number of women who are suffering from breast cancer - most people will know of at leaast one woman who has lost a breast or at least had a serious scare.

Unfortunately the aftercare and support here in Ireland is pretty poor and many women are unwilling to seek support from others for fear of being ridiculed by a society which is still suffering from a Victorian values " under the carpet'' mentality.

Sean Moncrieff is genuinely witty but unfortunately his guests on " Don't Feed The Gondolas'' are prone to reverting to sex and personal insults in their attempts to please the audience.

As part of his act, Moncrieff regularly catches out naive Dublin folk with ridiculous questions - the sort of people who want to make the city's O'Connell Street more middle class, which would mean excluding all northsiders, the sort of people who give out about farmers blocking the traffic, as 40,000 of them gather under Clery's clock for a few thousand " hang sammidges'', the same people who clog the country roads with their mammy's BMW and "mowbile'' phone, with their yellow V neck jumpers around their neck, tut-tutting about the poor and the " Kaw-tolic church'', and looking for "a decent cappucino'' - a species not to be found in your local Sinn Fein cumann.

" Last TV'' is another of Dublin's new wave of witty TV, except it was a shame to see Navan Man falling back on Benny Hill-style tactics, " women are pigs, wave your willy at them etc etc'', when his radio work has in the main been very clever and politically hard-hitting.

Who remembers " The Blades''? Ringsend's finest tipped for international after appearing on the all important Late Late Show in 1981. Talented songwriter Paul Cleary and his colleagues embraced socialism and his " working class consciousness'' but were cast out of one venue for playing The Sex Pistols " God Save The Queen'' - ``you won't play that muck in here boy''. And for the even older fogies Mick O Connell, the Kerry great, who spent hours kicking a ball against a gable wall in Valentia island, and rowing to training, looks remarkably fit for a man of sixty. On "Leargas'' he recounted the death of community life on the islands, the importance of saving our language, and his love for his family, including his Down Syndrome son Diarmuid, who has become the focus of his life. His likes will never be seen again.

By Sean O Donaile

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Contents Page for this Issue

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Reply to: An Phoblacht/Republican News

True Lies

by Prof. Ziauddin Sardar

The most famous line in Orwell's 1984 reads: 'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past'. This formula is slightly out of date. Today, who controls the fake controls reality - and thus controls the past, the present and the future. Fake breasts, fake watches, fake documentaries... we live in a culture where the bogus and the simulated rule. But what do we lose if we lose our faith in truth? Futures analyst ZIAUDDIN SARDAR asks us to return to the real. Quick 'S i Z E m a t t e r s', says a stylistic French woman.

The new advertisement for the 'New Clio' claims that four centimetres can make all the difference. She is apparently referring to wheel tracks. But in the context of the minimalist postmodernism that frames the advertisement, and the way the overtly sophisticated female plays with the measuring tape, we are intentionally led to another direction. This double entendre has all the refinement of a Carry On' film.

Size matters - both down there for men and up there for women. So what do the vast majority of people who do not have the right size do? Well, if they really think that size matters, they fake it. Men go for penis enlargement and women have their breasts 'enhanced'. In Europe and America, where less than one in four women breast feed their children, many are happy to pay thousands of pounds, risk their health, suffer discomfort and pain, just to increase the size of their breasts to the magical 38DD.

No matter how slender and toned the rest of a woman's body may be, a huge pair of boobs stuck on the front is considered to be - well, wow! Witness Pamela Anderson, Paula Yates, Daniella Westbrook, Melinda Messenger. The only assets, if you forgive the pun, that these women have is their plastic, fake breasts. But it says something about us and our times when silicone breasts are the only requirement for becoming an overnight sensation - and Wonderbras, delivered to American department stores in armoured vehicles, are subject of serious cultural analysis. Indeed, it seems to me that the world is awash with fake breasts. Every naked or bikini-clad breast that one encounters on television, films, magazines, the tabloids or cyberspace, is almost guaranteed to be plastic.

But something profound has happened here. In the process of becoming obsessed with fake and frankly grotesquely large breasts, we have lost sight of and downgraded the natural entity, forgotten its true function. Size has come to determine personality. But 'party tits', as the novelist Jay McInerny calls them, have only one function: to fulfil the fake desires of fake individuals. As Marilyn Yalom argues in her book, 'A History of Breasts' (Pandora), the more society becomes obsessed with breasts as erotic targets, the further breasts depart from their original nurturing function.

But there is more: reality itself has been redefined. The fake breast is not just bigger, better, sexier and more desirable than the real thing, it has also reshaped social and cultural behaviour. Fake breasts define glamour, therefore most women think this is the only way to be glamorous. Most young men are not just attracted to large, fake breasts: they even think that when a woman lies down, her breasts are supposed to stand straight up, like rockets ready for launching. Real breasts, which come in all shapes and sizes, have therefore been subverted, perverted, and declared inferior and undesirable; fake breasts thus become more real than the real item, more socially and culturally potent.

THE BOOB TUBE

What is true of breasts is true of the world at large. The real is under siege everywhere. The fake is being projected as more desirable and more preferable, with much more added value than the merely real. This is best illustrated in a new type of television show commonly known as 'reality television'. A good example is BBC's 'Halifax Boys', shown recently, which for all intents and purposes looks like a documentary. It purports to show the lives of two tearaway teenagers, Trevor and Stephen, in a tough Yorkshire estate. These fellows break into cars and homes, and are great supportive mates, a point emphasised when one of the teenagers falls in love with a girl pregnant by another local boy. There is only one problem: nothing in the show is true. The reality is totally fabricated; even the two leads had never met each other before filming. There are a host of similar shows all purporting to show real people in real situation - but all are scripted, rehearsed, shot as ordinary films (each scene involving a number of takes), all are fake constructions of reality. The most famous is 'Driving School' which made a star of its lead character, Maureen, who could never pass her driving test. Others include BBC's 'Hotel', 'Airport', 'Neighbours from Hell' and 'The Clampers' and ITV's 'Parking Wars'.

These shows may be entertaining, but they also have an ugly side. They present real life as though it was a long running drama. Ordinary people leading ordinary lives are depicted as though they are living out an Ibsen or a Pinter play; they lead not ordinary lives but lives of heightened tension, permanent crisis, high drama. Ordinary people, watching these other ordinary people, tend to wonder: why are our lives missing the drama?

There is a kind of invisible feedback loop: the constructed reality sucks in the unconstructed audience and persuades them to behave in a constructed way. This is best illustrated in Sky TV's 'Uncovered' series: Ibiza, Caribbean and 'Greece Uncovered'. Here the producers persuade young holiday makers to behave in a totally outrageous, and fake, fashion; when real holiday makers visit these places they assume that this is how one really ought to behave. The fake thus feeds the real; and the real becomes the fake.

The first causality in the loss of distinction between real and fake is truth. If the fake is more real than the real, why bother with the real and the true? Not just that truth is boring, it is much more difficult to confirm and even harder to film. Television documentaries have for a long time placed loose and fast with truth. The very grammar of film makes it difficult for the subject matter to be portrayed wholly truthfully: even a simple sequence as a person opening the door may require half a dozen different shots that have to be edited together. During my childhood, I used to be totally enchanted by Disney wildlife films which I always assumed to be true stories. And even today, we watch nature films as though they were unfolding a wild drama in all its stark reality and truth.

But the dodgy veracity of nature films is well illustrated by Jacques Cousteau, a patron saint of environmentalists. Cousteau devoted his life to revealing the secrets of the oceans; his documentaries introduced a whole generation of young folks, myself included, to the 'undersea world'. But Cousteau's documentaries were total fakes - they were deliberately structured to reveal a dramatic narrative.

In one episode, an expedition around the cape of Good Hope, we saw the story of two sea lions captured by the crew of the Calypso. The sea lions were given names, and trained to walk on the deck like dogs before being returned to the ocean, apparently unscathed. But the story was a lie. There were four, not two, sea lions: the understudies were needed when the first two died. They were kept out of the sea for filming so long that they expired from dehydration. In another case, footage of an octopus scrambling out of a Perspex tank before hopping overboard was obtained by pouring bleach into the container. Shots of a shark attacking a baby whale were recorded after the Calypso had injured the creature with a glancing blow. A sequence of two octopuses fighting was staged managed by divers who threw them together at the entrance to a narrow cave. Virtually all of Cousteau's films were fakes, including two Oscar-winning documentaries. In reality,

the fishes, octopuses and other marine creatures are not living a story - they are just living. The only way to turn them into a story is to fake it.

Television journalism is not far behind Cousteau. Indeed, we now have a new variety of journalism that either does not bother with truth at all or presents falsehood as truth. The CNN documentary 'Valley of Death', transmitted on its show 'NewsStand' and accompanied by an article in Time magazine, which was picked up by newspaper throughout the world, claimed that the US military used deadly nerve gas during a Vietnam-era mission in Laos to kill American defectors. A great and dramatic story: if only it was true. Over at the Boston Globe, it was revealed recently, characters populating the award-winning columns of Patricia Smith were 'fake'. Smith wrote pithy stories about city life and black culture; she forgot to tell her readers that they were fiction. At the New Republic magazine, Mike Gallagher wrote gripping features about teenage computer hackers and sex mad White House interns - they were dramatic largely because they were abricated. Then there was the famous expose of Carlton TV's documentary 'The Connection'. The award-winning film claimed to be a risk-laden investigation into the Cali cartel's new heroin route from Columbia to the school playgrounds of Britain. The film followed drug carriers from start to finish. But it told a story which was not true with evidence that was false.

One could dismiss these incidents as isolated cases. But the trend towards infotainment - journalism that is also drama and pure spectacle - is now well established. When I worked as a reporter for London Weekend Television during the early eighties, we did something called 'current affairs'. It was hard-hitting journalism that by today's account was definitely laid back but always told the truth. But by mid-eighties 'current affairs' was dismissed as boring talking heads. I left television because I was not interested in 'heightening' my journalism with 'reconstruction', slow motion and special effects. The boundary between constructing television journalism as drama and entertainment, and the falsification of facts, is a thin one. It is a boundary that is evaporating rapidly. Most contemporary docu-drama, including 'fly on the wall' stuff, is plainly constructed lies.

GUCCI-COOCHIE

Of course, constructed lies are not limited to television. Almost every country now has a thriving, black market for counterfeit products - watches, videos, perfumes, electronic and other consumer goods. Before the Asian crisis, an astonishing 20% of the region's economy was based on fake products. After the crisis, it has risen to an estimated 30%. The Asian counterfeit product comes in two forms: as dishonest fakes and as 'genuine imitations'.

The dishonest counterfeit product is cynically promoted by original western manufacturers themselves. When a multinational company carves out a new market in a non-western state, it does not manufacture its usual products itself. Instead, it subcontracts a local company to manufacture its goods and then markets them under its brand names. The advantages to the parent company are obvious: it can avoid all responsibility for exploitative practices such as poor working conditions, wages well below the legal minimum and use of child labour; it can keep the costs to a bare minimum and ensure maximum profit; and it can boast about helping local businesses.

But what of the product itself?

While it carries the brand name of the multinational corporation, it is in fact a totally different product, not least because its formulation has been changed and original ingredients have been replaced by cheaper ones. For example, Dettol or Colgate toothpaste sold in India is an altered, debased product that most western users of the products would not recognise - even though it may cost the same as in Europe or America. In India, Savlon from Johnson and Johnson, is a lurid, deep-orange soup that stains everything it touches. The item sold in the west looks and smells quite different. Thus, most of the western products sold in non-western countries are simulacra: while they look like the real things, and have been marketed by real western companies, they are in fact shoddy replicas.

The genuine imitations are local products. They are normally sold for peanuts and are almost indistinguishable from the real things. It is almost impossible, for example, to tell the difference between a real Gucci watch and a fake. Counterfeit CD's not only look the same as the real ones but have exactly the same sound quality - making it practically impossible, even for industry experts, to tell the difference. But it's not just fake watches, cassettes and CD's that are being marketed in Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Counterfeit culture produces everything from designer clothes to shoes, leather goods and even antiques. A common sight in the cities of south-east Asia are people totally dressed in fake designer labels looking every bit as chic as their rich neighbours with the real goods or their western counterparts on the street of New York, Paris and Geneva.

This counterfeit culture is very adoptive. One of the most popular fakes are the pirate videos of Holywood films which are often available even before a film is released in the US. After the Asian crash, the video cassettes became too expensive for ordinary consumers. So the market moved quickly to DVDs: video-CDs, with production quality as good as the original films, became widely available at a fraction of the cost of video cassettes.

I am not totally against this economy of the fake. In some ways it strikes a blow against capitalism and enables the poor of Asia to eke out a living. But it does have a darker underside: when it comes to fake spare parts for cars and counterfeit industrial processes we are on to seriously dangerous grounds. It is relatively easy in cities like Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur to have your car fitted with totally fake parts - carrying labels such as BMW and Renault - which have not been rigorously tested and are not altogether safe. An estimated one in four accidents in a city like Kuala Lumpur are caused by fake parts.

HYSTERIES AND HISTORIES

With fake history we move to even more dangerous grounds. If all lies are, to use the title of a famous postmodern film, 'True Lies', then what difference does it make whether history is based on historical facts or mythology? No one would argue that history is open to different interpretations. But these different interpretations have to be based on facts and data that can be reasonably and objectively verified. Fake history does away with historical objectivity altogether. And the traffic in fake history moves in both directions: historical facts are mythologised and pure mythology is transformed into factual history.

The best examples of this tendency come from India, a place dominated by all varieties of fake economies and cultures. Under the Hindu Nationalist government of BJP, Indian history has become a very contested territory, focused on the construction of 'the new Hindu history'. BJP equates this with 'national history'. Here, the mythological characters of Hinduism are painted as real and real history is presented as epic mythology.

Consider Ram, the central god of Hinduism. The traditional Ram of Hindu religiosity is a tender and tolerant god, a mythological character that inhabits the memories of traditional Hindus. The new Hindu history turns him into a historical fact: a linear construction devoid totally of the multi-layered complexity and richness of the mythological Ram. He now becomes an intolerant, violent Ram hell-bent on war against Muslims - despite the fact that even if he existed, he existed several thousand years before Islam. As a real historical figure, he has real historical sites, places and buildings, associated with him, which must now be cleansed from the influence of other religions and cultures. This has lead the nationalist Hindus to demolish the famous Barbari mosque in Ayodhya where Ram supposed to have built a temple. They have also declared over 2,000 Muslim monuments, including the Taj Mahal in Agra and the Jamia Mosque in Delhi, as originally built by Hindu rulers, or built on Hindu temples!

Factual history is turned into mythology by Hindu nationalists by submerging it into politics and ideology and attaching 'epic qualities' to historical events and situations. So, for example, certain historical battles between Muslims and Hindus are transformed into perpetual and eternal struggles. In this way, history is rooted out of its context and becomes timeless. The mythic time-schemes leak into historical, realist time - enabling a politicised 'Us' to define itself against a perceived historical enemy, 'Them'. The historical narrative simultaneously becomes narrow - trapped in certain places and events with external villains and internal victims - and circular: it returns to the same events, symbols and sentiments over and over again. So history becomes a sacred blend of cultural logic, social organisation, ideological convictions and political program. Fake history can thus be anything and often becomes everything.

Of course, this is not unique to nationalist Hindus. A great deal of postmodern history suffers from the same cultural logic. Recent works like Millennium by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, which selectively cut and paste characters, events and situations from a span of a thousand years, present history as though it was a designer consumer product. Afrocentric history often elevates African myths to the status of historical facts. Such fake histories often confuse interpretation with the interests of particular groups or fashionable trends.

What is lost is not just history but the very craft of the historian. Historical objectivity disappears and history is reduced to propaganda. Fake history is propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Propaganda, by definition, is a means of social control which relies on techniques that induce individuals and social groups to follow sectional interests and emotional drives. Propaganda is a matter of expediency, not morality - so it makes no difference whether the 'facts' it is based on are true or false. The moral force of history is thus undermined and history becomes a mere instrument.

DOES A LORRA WORK FOR CHARIDDY

Fake history brings us back to fake reality. Virtual reality, as we all now, is more real, more heightened, more fun. But it also expunges life of real blood and sweat, dirt and grime, pain and suffering. And just as fake history looses its moral imperative, fake reality has no place for morality - only expediency and contingency. It is not just that we are incapable of telling the difference when the fake is better than what it imitates: we can never really discover the difference. Thus all realities become at par with each other, all truths become relative and all objectivity is reduced to a charade.

So what becomes of real pain and suffering, injustice, and oppression that is going on out there: is it all fake, a mere simulation, or are there real people enduring real hardship and cruelty?

For a world that claims that all reality is socially constructed, which promotes fakes as the norm, the pain, suffering and the death of other people are particularly unreal. The culture of fakes serves as an insulating space that isolates those who live in a world of countless choices, including the choice to acquire fake breasts and identities, from those whose only choice is to be the unwilling victims of the modern and postmodern world.

This is why real pain and suffering, hunger and famine, seldom move people. They are happy to give a few pence to charity, but they do not really want to do anything positive about it - attack its real causes, stand up and defend the poor and the oppressed or speak out and fight against an unjust global economy. Notice how often 'charity' is combined with entertainment - its real function is not to eliminate suffering but to increase the enjoyment of those who wish to ease their guilty consciences. Fake reality, and the extreme anti-realist and irrational doctrine that goes with it, generate complacency and a permanent crisis of moral and political nerve among the middle and upper classes - the very people who are capable of raising their voices against policies and actions undertaken, often in their name, by those in power.

It is not possible for us to morally justify ceaseless oppression of non -western societies and cultures or of the poor and the marginalised in western society. So the culture of fakes provides us with a new alibi. It postulates that no moral stance is actually possible. Since all moral positions are equally valid or equally absurd, none are possible, and one might as well learn to enjoy the status quo. From the patently sensible assertion that culture cannot be grasped as a true or false representation of reality - as Marxists, for example, have argued for decades - we now have the absurd postmodern theses that all is fake and fake is better than anything real. That real is no longer real, that reality is but an illusion, that there is nothing but a perpetual and endless reconstruction of realities, that truth, history, arguments are nothing more than free-floating language-games.

From here, the next step of showing that oppressive and imperialistic political and economic policies and actions as representation of social reality and proving them to be totally unreal is a short one. Pain, suffering, oppression become as fake as Melinda Messenger's breasts.

Yet there are factual and moral truths out there which are as real as the 'smart bombs' that (mistakenly?) landed on civilian dwellings in Baghdad during the Golf War. There are real truths which stand above bare disagreements between competing viewpoints - that can be argued, that are amenable to historical evidence, and which involve standards of veridical warrant and accountability. There are real people who are going through real suffering right now.

The most famous line in Orwell's 1984 reads: 'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past'. This formula is slightly out of date. Today, who controls the fake controls reality and thus controls the past, the present and the future. In our postmodern world, fakes and simulations have grown so large that they entirely cover the things they imitate. The culture of imitation, of fake bodies, fake reality, fake commodities, fake history, is all about control.

Unlike the real which is unpredictable, unmanageable and therefore uncontrollable, the fake is totally predictable and manageable, thus so much easier to control. And, it seeks to control all those things that we value most in ourselves - our Self, our identity, our bodies, our imagination, all that makes us human. The only size that matters is the size of our humanity. We ought to remember this, the next time we ogle at a fake breast.

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Essay is copyright. First appeared in the Scottish The Herald of October 31, 1998. Reproduced on MSANEWS with Prof. Sardar's permission.

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