|
Column
Published in The Dallas Morning News, June 6, 2005
Suddenly the color orange is hot, hot, hot. Look at men's ties. Notice blouses on women. Take a look at bridesmaid's dresses this season. Orange has spread from Hermes in Highland Park Village, where it's long been the signature shade, to fashion emporiums all over the city. It connotes sunshine, radical youth, radiant independence. Threatening always to be too much, orange can scarcely contain its own exuberance.
Yet this is a color of complexity, capable of sunsets that darken into something sinister, of fire that consumes all available, breatheable air. Hence the name Agent Orange was applied to the herbicide used to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam during the war. According to one account, more than 37 million quarts of Agent Orange were dropped from 1965 to 1970, causing cancers among many, including American servicemen.
Indeed, one of those whose death was due to this dioxin was Naval officer Elmo Zumwalt, III, at age 42. He was the son of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr. who ordered the spraying to stop the high casualty rate among his sailors, stuck on river-patrol boats, unable to see the menace in the trees. Moreover, Lt. Zumwalt's son Russell has severe learning disabilities, probably traceable to chromosome damage his father sustained in Vietnam. So there's a cruel irony in the color orange.
It also can be really weird, as in A Clockwork Orange, the film by Stanley Kubrick. Pauline Kael called this movie "a porno-violent sci-fi comedy." In it, she wrote, Alex, purportedly the villain, "has been set apart as the hero by making his victims less human than he. . .Kubrick carefully estranges us from these victims so that we can enjoy the rapes and beatings. Alex alone suffers." I said it was weird.
Then there's the raving orange of the jumpsuits at Guantanamo, a symbol across the planet of men picked up in Afghanistan during that war and detained with no charges, for years, also in many instances abused. At least that seems the case in the docu-drama Guantanamo, by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo. Based on testimony and letters from Muslim prisoners who also are British citizens, it is a now a favorite at a private school for boys in Pakistan, according to the New York Times, which also reports that David Nicholl, a neurologist, ran the London marathon dressed in an orange jumpsuit to protest conditions at Guantanamo.
But whatever happened to the exhilaration of orange? Never gone for long, it surfaced superbly in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. There Viktor Yushchenko, barely functioning after near-fatal poisoning administered by the powers then entrenched, possibly with the aid of Russia, threw on an orange scarf and led crowds of people, deliriously determined, also brandishing orange scarves, in demonstrations, day after day, night after night, until a second election, the first having been stolen, was forced upon the thug-infested regime of Leonid Kuchma.
Ukraine was a triumph for orange. It also reminded that in the Hindu chakra, orange is the color of creativity. And where in the world is statecraft at this moment more creative than in Kiev? It's possible too that when orange is turned to odd or ominous interpretations what's going on is a reaction against the creative life, an assertion of Zeus over Prometheus, dull order over the flame of creativity.
The two sides of orange also could mirror duality in the universe -- light and dark, good and evil, joy and anguish. But for all its complications, no color has a more exciting spirit than orange. No wonder it's the primary harbinger of summer.
|
