Why New York’s elite are on a crusade to bring giant pandas to city
Despite protests from animal conservationists, the Big Apple’s rich and powerful are gathering, gala-ing and generally going gaga in their efforts to secure a pair of pandas to show in Central Park
“Children love pandas!” declared Representative Carolyn Maloney with the giddy conviction of a politician getting behind something incontrovertible.
Up on the 18th floor of that soon-to-be-gutted, now-owned-by-the-Chinese monument to American greatness, the Waldorf Astoria, a crowd of 450 was deep in thrall to a strange panda fantasia – one that has drifted through New York’s power elite like a wishful-thinking, public-spirited psychedelic reverie over the past few months (intensified, in a way, by the anti-establishment election).
The event was to raise money – US$50 million being the estimated goal – to bring a couple of pandas to live in Central Park. The dream had proved unbelievably flexible: Democrats for pandas, Republicans for pandas, and, above all, New York (and Chinese) money for pandas; pandas as cuddly “Can’t we all just get along?” political metaphors and icons of world trade; pandas for peace and mutual respect, and the branding opportunities that could bind rival empires together, but in any event pandas who could never be pressed into military service over the islands in the South China Sea.
Pandas as crowd-pleasing trophies of city pride (the Washington, Atlanta, San Diego and Memphis zoos have them, but New York’s Bronx Zoo last had them, and only briefly, in the late 1980s); pandas as paragons of a kind of toddler-like, clumsy innocence – we must protect them! – and of conservationism (there’s a reason the World Wildlife Fund has a panda as its logo; without human support, it’d be hard for them to even survive the Anthropocene).