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It’s been a long time since I picked up a comic book.  As a kid, I used to read them all the time.  “Thor” was a favorite, being one of the few Marvel characters that didn’t seem like just one more guy in a super-suit.

Anyhow, I came across the new “Thor” while browsing magazines the other day, and the artwork alone induced me to buy it.  My first thought was, “Holy @#$%, a comic book costs that much these days?”

And then…advertisements.  I know, I’ve been living under a rock, but I didn’t expect ads for Old Spice and Saturn in a comic book that just cost me four bucks to start with. 

Price aside, I had no complaints. The paper quality and artwork has come a long way. 

To my further surprise, the story was actually decent.  This was “Thor #3″ and apparently it’s a new series, as Marvel previously killed off Thor in some prior issue.

A bit of internet research got me caught up on all the back story.  Let me say, as an aspiring and perspiring author, it drives me nuts that comic book writers can get away with murder and not miss a sale.  Thor’s Marvel character biography will only make sense to you if you’ve:  1) followed the stories since their inception  2) taken drugs.

Thor, over the years, has been turned into a frog, has turned into a woman, has killed his brother twice, has been killed himself twice, has been impersonated by an alien, and has done everything short of being split into an atom.

But, here he is, fresh from the void, with a new look, and a brooding, pensive attitude that seems to be the persona trend these days.  (But I suppose being dead can make a guy cranky.)

I wonder what it takes to get on board as a comic book writer.  With that kind of leeway, I could really wreck havoc. Like… Next issue: Thor discovers a long-lost cousin.  Bahahaha.

 I’m being buried alive by my own junk.   I’m not a technoid or a gotta-have-it type, but somehow I’ve accumliated a small warehouse of obsolete electronic goods. 

 Remote controls that I can’t identify, that go to products I may no longer have, pile up for the day when I might get brave and throw them all out.

Tiny media cards that belong to various generations of digital cameras seem to multiply through the house, appearing at random.  Except, of course, when I need one, and then there’s none in sight.

Dead VCR’s sit silent and dusty, in case the $40 DVD player I own fails me, and in case I find wisdom in spending twice that much to fix a broken VCR.  Who the hell am I kidding?  Yet the VCR could be fixed, and therefore maybe should be fixed, but…why?

Perhaps most eerie, are the blank, faceless CRT monitors of computers long gone, that wait, disembodied and dark, to be reconnected with another machine and restored to life.  Alas, they wait in vain, as flat-panel monitors - from China - are available under $150.00.

Tangled nests of power cords, battery packs, and surge suppressors form a grotto of mysterious cables that daunt my organizational skills and therefore occupy a large box.  They lay in there, like dormant snakes, waiting for me to stick my hand in. 

For not being especially fond of technology, I wonder at my own inability to part ways with the electronic relics that haunt my home.  Maybe it’s that I hate wasting things.  This stuff still works, or might work, or could work, given some minor investigation and repair. 

Though the truth is, it can all be replaced, and in most cases it would be cheapier and easier to do so.  Yet the notion of disposable technology hasn’t taken root with me.  I’m used to electronics and gadgets costing a small fortune.  The idea of changing cell phones every year, or upgrading to the latest-and-greatest computer every new release, just doesn’t feel natural.  I still have this archaic mentality that stuff is supposed to last. 

And in my house, it does last! Whether it’s plugged in or not. 

Mattel’s woes over lead-based paint in toys manufactured in China, is a reminder that you get what you pay for.   It wasn’t the first incident of a tainted product from China and it won’t be the last.  

Most Americans are unphased by product recalls. We’re used to them.  Cars, spinach, laptop computer batteries….we’ve seen it all come back.  So when something flubs in China, we give a collective shrug, grumble a bit about shoddy, cheap manufacturing, and then go back to Wal-Mart and buy more Chinese crap.

What is being overlooked in the product recalls from China, is the fact that China itself is a communist country, and it cannot be trusted to be forthcoming on product safety. China does not make mistakes.  China does not apologize. 

And despite having the world’s largest population and scant natural resources to sustain it, China will never accept seeing itself as anything less than the most powerful nation on earth.  Quietly, as we buy cheap crap that poisons our pets and our children, and China destroys it’s own water supply to produce it….the Chinese government is busy building up it’s military and planning space missions. 

What, you think they’re just going to fold up shop when they run out of water, oil, or non-contaminated food?  Hell no.  China already knows it’s resources and population will reach critical mass within the next 10 to 20 years.  What China needs, China will get.  There’s no acceptance of economic failure when you have a population of billions to support and your goverment’s power has nothing to do with democracy.  

China did not become wealthy because of its clever ideas or scientific breakthroughs or social reforms or political freedoms.  Hello…anybody else the least bit nervous?

Have I mentioned yet, that China has more crimes punishable by death than any civilized nation in the world?  Including such hair-raising crimes like….tax evasion.  No appeals. Just a single bullet in the back of the head at point-blank range.  To catch up with modern times, some Chinese cities now use execution vans that look like ordinary police transport vehicles, and these cruise around to administer lethal injections.  How many people die like this?  Nobody knows. China doesn’t share that sort of info, and being a Communist nation, it never will.  Only high-profile cases, like the execution of a corrupt CEO, gets any press release through the government-controlled media.  The more mundane business, like the daily busload of prisoners taken to killing fields and shot, goes unmentioned.  

Speaking of unmentioned….anybody remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Bejing, in 1989? Nobody in China does. You’re not allowed to remember.  It didn’t happen.  Journalists were arrested for covering it.  If you’re in China and you Google it, nothing pulls up.  So it doesn’t matter that hundreds - perhaps thousands - of students and workers were shot down by the military during a democracy rally.  Not counting those arrested and summarily disposed of.  

Ya know what’s a kicker?  George Bush Sr., our president at the time, backed sanctions against China as a result of the incident.   That bit of history isn’t stopping Bush Jr. from accepting the Chinese government’s invitation to the 2008 Olympics.  Or from looking the other way as the Chinese Yen is illegally undervalued by it’s own country and the trade deficit grows.

Nobody remembers the Hainan Island incident in 2001, either…or at least knows it by the facts. A United States spy plane had physical contact with a Chinese military plane within International airspace.  The Chinese plane crashed and the pilot died.  The U.S. plane with 24 crew members made an emergency landing, and was detained.  The U.S. ended up sending two formal letters of apology and accepted responsibility for the incident…even though the black boxes of both planes were held by China and the cause of the air contact could not therefore be pinned to the U.S. pilot.  The crew members were eventually released to the U.S., after enduring Chinese interrogation.

But hell, we cheerfully ushered China into the World Trade Organization later that same year.   Our own government lauded China’s entry, pitching the boon of a huge market that would now be open to U.S. products.   The fact that most of China’s population couldn’t afford a ripe orange, even if they combined their money together, didn’t seem to phase us.  China’s piss-poor human rights record, and the edgy military incident of just a few months prior, didn’t matter when the cash register was open.  

One enormous trade deficit later, China owns more in U.S. financial securities than we would care to admit. 

There are two faces to China.  They allow us to see the “New China.”  Shiny. Modern. Efficient.  Recently considered a “developing country”, it now sees itself as a superpower, perhaps rightfully so.  Behind all the new plastic and lead-based paint, however, there remains the “Old China.”  Communist.  Forbidding. Silent. Unmerciful. The China we forgot, the China that Google isn’t allowed to show in Bejing.