Let's recall the toys. Let's discipline all those little boys who have been manufacturing them, too, for endangering our lives. It's time the adults were back in charge again.
We're tired of lead entering the bodies of our children from Iowa to Iraq. We're tired of cheap goods passed off as name brands, Yale- and Harvard-educated presidents who are learning-disabled lunatics, "commanding generals" who are publicists, "journalists" who are stenographers, diplomats who act like drunken sailors on shore leave, attorney generals who are crooks, gay bashers who are closeted gays, moralists who are lechers, drunks and pedophiles, presidential candidates with no vision or spine. We're tired of learning about dangers to our health long after the fact of our exposure to the poison.
This week, the Washington Post reported that Bush's past two heads of the Consumer Product Safety Commission were bought off by the industries they regulate. They got 30 free trips to various parts of the world where the unsafe products are made and came back praising the effectiveness of "voluntary" standards monitored by the manufacturers themselves. Because they've worked so well these past six years, apparently.
Mostly, though, I speak about our Boy Commander and the toys we've allowed him to play with these past six years. He's made quite a mess of our collective living room, hasn't he? He will get no ice cream or pretzels until he picks up all the toys he's already scattered to every corner, including the ones he's hidden in undisclosed locations like under the sofa or up the chimney flue.
All this hand-wringing over shoddy products being imported from China is a sideshow. What did we think they were making in those grim factories? Quality goods? They underpay and overwork the often underaged workers, use corporal punishment as discipline, and expect workers to return the next day, robotically. The human machine can only take so much.
Think about our own lives. Working a string of meaningless and lousy "service industry" jobs is a veritable rite of passage in the U.S. If you've worked in a factory, warehouse or restaurant kitchen, you know that, at some point, the perfect storm of lousy pay, wretched bosses, unventilated work spaces and impatient customers will make you snap. Kitchen staffs sabotage food orders not because they want to harm the customer, but because they want to explode the whole crazy nightmare inside which they're trapped. They don't let a Toast 'R Oven fall from a top bin at a warehouse, then pick it up and put the tinkling broken item in the "Mail Order" out box, because they want to harm the eagerly awaiting buyer. They do it to get back at… who? what?
Frankly, I'm surprised, given how much enmity Bush and his GOP goons have brought down on America's head, that we aren't flooded with product malfunctions and poisons. You don't like lead paint on your Thomas trains? Get over it. It could have been arsenic or sulfuric acid. Hell, the Chinese put diethylene glycol (read: antifreeze) in our toothpaste and barely a whimper was heard. Why do you think it only cost 99 cents?
America needs to collectively grow up or go to our rooms and think about what we did wrong. Then we can come out and join the countries who are playing well together.
What do you think?
Email editor@valleyadvocate.com.
