Yellow Peril

The line between hyperbole and slander may be hazy, but it is there and it is regularly crossed. The USA, being in dire need of external enemies that can be used to distract us from the self destruction we're engaged in, is far from scrupulous when it comes to accurately portraying that vast and growing country upon which we have become heavily dependent: China, or as Lou Dobbs loves to call that authoritarian capitalist nation in order to invoke those dear dead cold war days, Communist China.

Today's New York Times gives us three inflammatory cartoons. One shows a giant and horrifying dragon in the form of a jack-in-the-box toy looming over two terrified children and with a caption reading "Chinese business ethics." Another shows a man trying to commit suicide by playing with a "made in China" toy and a third is a scene of smiling Chinese workers, some in Mao hats, making poison filled toys. It's titled Santa's Little Helpers.

Dangerous toys used to be a pet theme amongst left-leaning Americans in the last century. Television specials, holiday horror stories and endless Saturday Night Live skits portrayed unscrupulous and greedy capitalists as child murderers, but in our new Corporatocracy, it's been turned around with the help of hyperbole and hysteria and some good old fashioned xenophobic lying. It doesn't matter that the levels of lead we're talking about would only be dangerous if your child were to eat Thomas the Tank Engine for breakfast every morning for years and it doesn't matter that domestic food is as likely or more likely to be contaminated as is Chinese fish, it's so much more fun to externalize the dark side of unregulated capitalism then to face it.

In fact, the problems with Chinese goods have been due to that country's explosion into crony capitalism and our country's relapse into crony capitalism where regulatory agencies are seen as the enemy not the protector of the consumer and staffed with republican hacks. That doesn't stop cartoonists from depicting thirteen hundred million people as evil, Fu Manchu inspired enemies without "business ethics" while neglecting to note that the Asiatic entrepreneurs who cut corners or who were duped into buying tainted commodities by other unscrupulous entrepreneurs have either been shot in the back of the head by the Chinese justice system or killed themselves before facing the firing squad, whilst those charged with protecting the American public rarely face any consequences at all.

Interviews of the thousands of Chinese workers now out of a job and furious at their greedy employers and their incompetent regulatory agencies aren't as satisfying to our bigotry as racist cartoons or moldy old references to Communism and the Yellow Peril. When your Sony goes dark and is unrepairable the day after the warranty ends, you usually blame Sony, not the Japanese people. You don't make grotesque cartoons of sneaky Japanese workers plotting to ruin your day. We've learned that such things aren't socially acceptable, but that still doesn't apply to China. Some company makes a fast buck from substituting Glycol for glycerin and it's just fine to draw pigtailed bucktoothed caricatures of The Chinese.

Nobody in the US blamed American workers or capitalism itself when Ford Explorers shredded their right rear tires and went out of control into roadside ditches or when Ford Pintos blew up when hit from behind or when Tylenol started appearing with cyanide in it or when massive quantities of foodstuffs tainted with mercury, salmonella and e-coli endangered the public health, or when some diet drug or arthritis drug or diabetes drug gave you a heart attack. We wouldn't laugh at cartoons showing Americans smiling while putting Vioxx into bottles with skull and crossbones on them. Just keep laughing and remember when hiding your head in the sand, to keep your eyes closed.