Wag the dog

Question everything, children. Stop me if you've already heard me pontificate about this.

Under the freedom of information act, I need to come clean and tell you that I'm a big one for global conspiracy theories. You don't spend the majority of your formative years in Catholic school without some inkling of the power of mind control. Most people believe what you tell them to believe.

I also need to come clean and tell you that I once dated a very sexy and highly principled Communist, who had the quickest wit on earth and played a wicked game of pool. We broke up amicably, but not before I'd bought a year's subscription to Green Left Weekly.

I'm convinced that the Americans are waging a hate campaign against their new enemy -- the Chinese.

It goes like this. The Olympics are coming. For the last four years, the Chinese people -- all 500 trillion bazillion of them -- have been engaged in a unified campaign to present a new, bold, and superior face of China to the world. Every taxi driver in Beijing is learning English. Modern superstructures are being built. People are working, working, working. The economy is booming. You saw "Reds", you know the drill.

It's the antithethis of America. While Beijing flourishes, the New Orleans levies overflow, Wall Street crashes, and Vietnam continues -- only this time, it's in Afghanistan. America counter-attacks by building a Starbucks in The Forbidden City.

Through it all, the American people are still being told to believe that they are the smartest, strongest, richest and most powerful people on earth. This is partly because their exposure to China is pretty much limited to Jackie Chan movies and lunch at the Mandarin.

By the time the eyes of the world are on China in 2008, America won't know what hit them.

Which is why, the American government needs to sow the seeds of hate now, while China is off the radar of most god-loving Americans.

What better way to do that than to do a little fear-mongering among the most tired, over-worked group there is: parents. We all know fear works -- have you been to an airport lately? So how about a complete toy recall because of "impermissable" levels of lead.

"Oh look at those nasty Chinese people....they're poisoning our children." Stage one in the new Cold War.

But what they don't tell you is that the American government CHANGED the "permissable" levels of lead before the recall. They used to be higher. They used to be permissable! For years, the super-sized ankle-biters of America were just fine gumming up their Hot Wheels and sticking Barbie's head in their mouths.

That was until America realized that there was a new global, nuke-loving superpower waiting to emerge.

I could be wrong. But probably not. Watch the spin and decide for yourself.