We should name the giant panda cub after Elvis Presley. Here’s why.
On Dec. 21, 1970, Elvis Presley visited Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. On Feb. 21, 1972, President Nixon visited China. On April 16, 1972, two giant pandas — Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing — arrived at the National Zoo in Washington.
That, my friends, is what we call cause and effect: a straight line from Elvis to Nixon, from Nixon to the pandas.
We must continue that line, completing the circle: from the pandas back to Elvis. We must name the National Zoo’s new panda cub after the King of Rock and Roll.
The photo of Elvis Presley shaking hands with Richard Nixon is one of the most striking images in modern U.S. history, the very embodiment of incongruity. It began with a restless Elvis flying from Memphis to Washington, then to Los Angeles before deciding to head back east.
Writer Peter Carlson recounted the curious meeting in a 2010 article in Smithsonian magazine: “Elvis was traveling with some guns and his collection of police badges, and he decided that what he really wanted was a badge from the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs back in Washington. ‘The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him,’ Priscilla Presley wrote in her memoir, ‘Elvis and Me.’ ‘With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.’ ”
Elvis Presley was a fan of panda bears. In 1957 at Graceland, he posed with Mary Kosloski, 8, of the March of Dimes surrounded by stuffed pandas that were auctioned off for charity. (Courtesy of Elvis Presley Enterprises/Courtesy of Elvis Presley Enterprises)
Aboard the flight, Elvis wrote a note to Nixon decrying the drug culture and “hippie elements” that were threatening the nation. He offered to help combat them. “I will be [in Washington] for as long as it takes to get the credentials of a Federal Agent,” he wrote. “I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good.”
After the plane landed, Elvis delivered the note to the White House. Six hours later — clad in a purple velvet suit, a massive belt buckle and a shirt collar as big as a nurse’s wimple — he was ushered into the Oval Office.
When Elvis left the building, he had his badge, the ostensible purpose of his visit.
But what if there was more to that meeting? What if the narc badge was just a cover for Elvis’s true reason for visiting Nixon: to formally request the importation from China of a giant panda?
Scoff if you will, but Elvis had a well-chronicled connection to pandas. In 1956, after cutting “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” in a Manhattan recording studio, the singer took the train from New York to Memphis. Photographer Al Wertheimer accompanied him.
The train ride was a butt-numbing 27 hours long. Elvis killed time listening to acetates of his recordings on a small portable record player. Then someone in his entourage produced a gigantic stuffed panda. It became an ice-breaking prop as Elvis walked through the train’s carriages, flirting with girls along the way. Wertheimer snapped photo after photo of Elvis: Here is the panda perched on Elvis’s hip like a toddler. Here it is sitting next to him. Here it is stuffed in an overhead luggage rack.
At one point, two teenagers said they didn’t believe Elvis really was who he said he was.
“See that photographer over there?” he asked. “Would he be taking my picture if I wasn’t Elvis Presley?”
The rich black-and-white images Wertheimer captured are striking. It’s hard to decide who’s cuter: the fuzzy panda or the nascent heartthrob. (Just search online for the images.)
Elvis was to have another interaction with pandas of the stuffed variety. In December 1957, he had a “date” with 8-year-old Mary Kosloski, the national March of Dimes poster girl. A photograph exists of Elvis and Mary sitting on the stairs at Graceland surrounded by . . . stuffed pandas. The plush toys were purchased by Elvis to be auctioned as a fundraiser for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.
Elvis may have sung about teddy bears, but he obviously had a thing for panda bears. (He also had a dead twin, just like the new panda.)
In their day, Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley were polarizing figures. Their legacies are controversial. But we must not forget that one brought us unforgettable music. The other opened the door to China. Together, they brought us giant pandas. Let us honor that legacy. Let us name the new panda “Elvis.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...1c2ffa-58a1-11e5-b8c9-944725fcd3b9_story.html
Okay then John Kelly... you be you.
