A
panda gives birth to twin cubs and we obsess.
What
is it about pandas and sex? We scour the globe for mates for lone
pandas. We strive to create matching pairs. We salivate, like
porn-junkies, waiting for them to mate. Their coitus is a world
spectacle, as fraught as a moon-landing.
Why don't we just
let them get on with it?
They're
endangered. Of course. But so are black-footed ferrets and bonobos
and we don't pore over their sexual gropings. Is it because pandas
are
big and bulky and we're intrigued, as a form of perverse
Attenborough-voyeurism in our obesity-damned age, about how they
actually do it?
Or
is it simply that pandas are, broadly-speaking, Chinese and we're all
obsessed with China now? Consider the hysteria at recent falls in
prices on the Chinese stock market. It is more inflamed than the
hysteria around the advance of Jeremy Corbyn's temerity. TV pundits,
low-rent
economists, fiscal fixers and dodgy dealers tell us these are matters
of huge importance.
An
endangered woman sits in the waiting area of clinic 4 at Altnagelvin
Hospital, the pain of illness evident on her lined face. She stares
blankly at two economists acting out on the BBC TV
news. It's not clear if the story is the panda births or the China
stock-market collapse. She waits her turn.
Pundits
tell us the Chinese economy is changing from one of production to one
of consumption. The year-on-year (dread phrase) rise in economic
growth is slowing, maybe even stalling. Of course it is. There is
only so much natural resource and human labour you can burn up before
its done.
The
Chinese won't get it together. Corporations
want to sell them technologies, values and practices. And then get
consumers to
buy their tat. Corporate
shareholders
don't care that millions of
people
have moved from rural areas to half-built cities in order to produce
the over-priced digital tat their corporations flog. Now, like the
pandas, the corporations,
their banks and hedge-funds
are playing hard to get.
There's
shrinking demand, the currency is cheapened, the country people –
peasants, if you don't mind – can't go back to the country to grow
food, make love, have children and leisure. It's worse than the
pandas. They lost the bamboo forests. The country people have lost
the whole eco-caboodle; fields, rivers, lakes, mountains, ways of
life and social relations. That's progress. And the great continent
of Africa is next.
So what’s to be
done? Straight up? Stop gambling on currencies and stocks as if they
were chips in a vain casino, which is actually mostly what they are
these days. If investments are only to make a bigger bang for the
bucks of shareholders, without any thought for the products or the
producers involved, it's like obsessing about panda sex without any
consideration for their well-being or their world.
Leave the pandas
alone. If they want to get into it, they will. Stop feeding them
viagra-laced bamboo love-shoots. Let them feel safe and happy and
they'll get it on. Wouldn't we all?
Save the quiet, safe
places of the panda boudoir.
Spare us the videos
and the images of glum-faced stock-market floor-traders.
Can the casino. Make
love not cash.
She still waits
her turn.
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