Last Chance, China: Step Away From the Pandas!

That's it. Let's declare war on China. We want pandas. We deserve pandas. And now China ain't giving us the pandas we want, deserve and paid $56,000 trying to get.

To quote Randy Newman, "let's drop the big one and see what happens".

We've tried to stay happy here in Albuquerque. But as citizens, despite our attempts to ignore it, there has been a hole in our existence. A void. We try to pretend to live happy lives, filling that void with things like balloons and Isotopes Park and maybe an arena, but the hole in our hearts is still there.

And we've always known only one thing could really fill that hole. Pandas. Cute, cuddly pandas.

And now those Godless Communists, or former Communists, or whatever the Hell they are now Chinese have pulled the panda rug out from under us, leaving us bereft. Is that fair? Is it fair that just because we can't produce our own lovable, cuddly creatures to put in our zoo that some authoritarian country half a world away can prevent us from being able to adopt one or two?

No, it's not. We just want to have pandas. Like any prospective city would. One might say it's one of the biggest steps to becoming a real city, getting pandas. And now, we're barren. We're pandaless. And there ain't any combination of hormone shots and fertility drugs around that can help us now.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry, it's hard for a city to not get emotional about something like this. We've just got to pull ourselves together, suck up that $56,000 we spent and try to move on with our lives.

But you know what would best help us carry on in this time of pandaless misery? Getting back at the ambiguous economic modeling bastards that have left us this way. That's right. Let's use some of those 2,000 or so nukes over at Kirtland and blow the Chinese to Kingdom Come. Hell, it probably won't even come to that.

Just have some folks at Sandia National Labs (remember, they want the pandas, too! They want to share custody of the pandas!) threaten to blow Shanghai off the face of the earth and we'd probably have a pair of cute, cuddly mini-bears in a week. Two weeks tops.

And if that didn't work, I'm prepared to go all the way. Total thermonuclear war. Because living in a city without pandas is living in a city not worth living in. The pain of walking by an zoo cage lovingly strewn with bamboo and not seeing those little "bandit" faces is just too much. The hole is just too big.

So let's fill the hole with weapons. You have to admit, bombs are the one thing we Americans have enough to share with everyone. You won't play ball with us, China, we'll share with you. You wanna deprive us of the right of adoption, we won't deprive you of the right to go straight to Hell.

Who's with me? Who's ready to show China and the world how badly we want to adopt a panda? Who wants to quit walking around our forlorn city metaphorically pushing an empty panda baby carriage, shopping at Panda Baby-R-Us and crying ourselves to sleep every night hugging a pillow shaped like that cute, cuddly panda cub we so desperately miss?

Cue the rest of the Randy Newman song...."boom goes Guangzhou, boom Beijing...more pandas for you and more pandas for me...."