Death by Cheap Crap

When my daughter was very young, two and three and four, and even for years after, her most favorite toys were Thomas and his dozens of friends-- the pricey wooden engines from those odd English stories. We had track and bridges and viaduct and tunnels, and thus a living room floor that was often a hazard, but mostly she played with them as dolls with wheels and smokestacks, converting the shed and the long-coveted roundhouse into group homes. She is, after all, a girl, if, nonetheless, a girl who did not potty train 'til she was bribed with locomotives. Though they currently occupy some prime closet space that could probably be more wisely allocated, those trains are the toys I'll never get rid of, the ones that I'll pass down to future generations, or at least let them play with, or at least touch. I have no intention of letting go of the stuff that a childhood was made of.

So it was a relief when our sets were too old to be included in that lead paint-spurred recall; it would have been awkward to issue respirators and rubber gloves to my potential grandkids someday.

I admit that I was surprised that Thomas was poisoned, though I would not have been shocked to learn his writers were on drugs. The fortune I invested in those small blocks of wood, combined with the British cloud that obscured its origins, created the illusion of a good and presumably safe toy. It's not as if they came out of a grocery store machine. And besides, wood is always the Expensive Toy Story code for Better For Your Baby. If that stuff can't be trusted, what can be?

Nothing, apparently. Mattel has recalled millions of pieces of plastic, and you know if that's the stuff they feel they need to draw our attention to, there must be billions more trinkets out there that are nearly as bad. And that's Mattel. Which still leaves the billions of doo-dads from Wal-Mart and the Dollar Tree, the carnival and Chuck E. Cheese. And, as yesterday's headlines reported, the baby bibs and junk jewelry. And the toothpaste, and the dogfood, and the seafood and fish. Rely on a nation known for neither public disclosure nor public safety to produce everything for nothing and get less than the very best? Who would have thought!

Now apparently Chinese pigs have some mysterious dread disease , though the Chinese won't say, since that's what they (don't) do, that's wreaking havoc there and potentially other places, markets and food chains being as entwined as they are. Maybe someday it will matter, maybe not (see SARS and Bird Flu), but it does not seem to bode well, since we seem to be fighting an undeclared war of death by stuff.

It's almost tempting to say that we get what we deserve, that it's only logical that if something costs nothing even after it's been shipped across the world one shouldn't assume that it's okay, regulation and conscientious employees costing money (even when there's not a culture gap to bridge) but we do, after all, live somewhere the government took on that role of protecting its citizens from stuff quite some time ago, back when it was a little dangerous to take even American-made products at their word. So now we assume we're protected, but unless one is a corporation, the answer seems to be no. The rest of have been sold out in this race to the bottom. Hope they at least got a good deal.