Some of us may be old enough to remember Nikita Khrushchev's famous utterance, "We will bury you," from 1956. He didn't exactly mean it the way it sounds--it was a loose translation made by someone who obviously didn't understand Russian very well. He meant that capitalism would fall on its own accord from bloat and topheaviness, and that Communists would be shovel-ready to pile dirt on the corpse.

He was wrong about a lot of things, including which Communists would be doing the burying. Modern-day China, whose political and economic system would give Karl Marx an aneurism, is delighted to shower us with a panoply of defective and poisonous goods that we are happy to purchase at places like Wal-Mart because they are less expensive than their American-made competition used to be, back when America was making stuff.

Lead in our children's toys, melamine in our pet food, and now some mysterious gas trapped in our drywall that sabotages our air conditioning and rots the wiring in our flat-screen TVs...could it all be part of a mysterious Manchurian Candidate-type plot to rot us from within? A silent, creeping terrorism that we won't be aware of until it's too late?

Confucius say: He who buy cheap junk always get more than he bargain for.