Why New York’s elite are on a crusade to bring giant pandas to city

“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).

This is all besides their being such adorable plushie fluff (for those fluffy people who were hoping to make their world a little fluffier again). Who knows why we are supposed to care about these sleepy-eyed crea­tures, really – though we instinctively tend to – much less how practical this grand panda dream is. The important thing seemed to be that, emerging bleary-eyed and anxious from the election season, New York’s powerful people had to care about something uncontroversial, had to gather together at charity galas and sit in those faux-bamboo chairs at the benefit for some reason. And suddenly the list of inoffensive causes had shrunk so radically that it seemed maybe a couple of fat black-and-white creatures – who eat almost exclusively what is the world’s least nutritious vegetation and who take a rather lackadaisical approach to procreation – were the only thing these people could agree on any more.

It’s panda populism: check out the Washington National Zoo’s panda cam!

And so, on the evening of February 8, the Black & White Panda Ball was held. Maloney was dressed, intentionally, rather like a panda, in a sleeveless black-with-white-polka-dots LK Bennett dress she’d bought for the occasion. Onstage at the Starlight Roof, she was extolling what pandas could do to heal the city, maybe even the country, in the face of American Carnage. “They are also a symbol of good luck and, after the tumultuous time we had over the past two decades, I think it’s time to have some of these pandas.”