Commie spies at Los Alamos National Laboratories. The Senate just approved a ballistic missile defense system. Bush and Dole are running for President. You know, the more things change...

I guess we all miss those Cold War years, with the good guys and the bad guys all wearing the right hats and plenty of money to be made building bombs, planes, Yakoff Smirnoff sitcoms. If we could just start a fifty year feud with China we could make Jackie Chan into the "humanizing symbol" of the great red horde and give the man a much deserved sitcom. Well, maybe I just want to see Jackie Chan kick the hell out of Paul Reiser.

So, we've had a Chinese spy operating in Los Alamos for years. I wonder what kind of damaging technology wasn't given to the Chi-Coms. Probably not much. First, the spy had to correct the math of dumb white American scientists, and then he had to smuggle the info out of the country -- that takes time.

Of course, its our own racist dogma which makes us think that the Chinese could never, say, aim a nuclear war head without stealing the technology. When American strategists imagine conversations between Chinese weapons designers they hear words like this: "Oh, we so dumb and undereducated. How they Americans make those bombs go on target? How come they so smart when they so crazy?"

Now, China's a bad place to be a dissident. In fact, it's a bad place to... express opinions. But our government doesn't really care about that. China's one of our most favored trading partners. Sure, we don't like it when they torch protesters. But we hate them when they bootleg Hollywood movies.

"You see," our American defense strategists say, "They can't even make You've Got Mail by themselves, so of course they have to steal our guidance systems." Well, if they don't start making their own Hollywood movies, that trade status is in jeopardy. They should round up a bunch of people and torture them until they can act like Tom Hanks if they want to trade with us.

If there's room for a little cynicism, I'd like to float this hypothesis -- U.S. weapons developers helped China spy on Los Alamos so that the Chinese could make missiles good enough to shoot down with space lasers. Then we'll be able to start all over again with Anti-commie paranoia and bomb raid drills and Bloom County cartoons and David Bowie and The Police and Mike Tyson married to Robin Givens...

A mere fear of domestic terrorism could never give us a culture like that.

Michael Maiello secretly likes to listen to his Culture Club Greatest Hits CD when no one else is around.