Orange You Noticing?

I certainly am.

What? What now, Mike, you’re probably thinking, and why “orange” in the title again?

Well, the orange is the point. What orange this time? Not the orange safety gear, though that continues to assault us on every street in the dominion, every hour of day or night. Nor is it the humble orange imported great distances to our food shops, though that is another wasteful enterprise furnishing us with food we don’t need.

It’s an overarching orangeanity, an orangitude, an orangitint everywhere, all over the place that vexes me.

All over everyday places and the oddest places. A post-election joke about about Jack Layton getting Stornoway painted orange, NDP colours, ha ha, not really ha.

In the bathroom of a fancy hotel (for me fancy is any three-star hotel) I stayed at recently, I gazed into the mirror at my knobby old body, and the thing looked definitely healthier, the skin darker toned…orange! They do this with the mirror somehow! They orange you!

The style section of the Saturday Globe and Mail, the only newspaper I regularly buy, has invested heavily in orange. Orange clothes, orange hair on the models (no, it isn’t auburn, isn’t brown, it’s freaking orange), orange backgrounds if they can’t get it in anywhere else. In fact there is orange, glossy orange colour, in every section of that newspaper. 

Furniture has darkened and reddened, gone from brown to orange. Just try and find any other colour in wood furniture.

Why is all this orangeification happening? Don’t be surprised that I have a theory. Or two. The simplest one is that an ugly world both merits and gets an ugly colour. To put it more fully, things are really bad right now, right? The dominos of national economy are tumbling one after the other—Greece, Ireland, Spain, everywhere. China is muscling its way up into top-dog power; the Americans are out, and are freaking out, getting ready to go completely berserk. (Phone me for details. Better yet, duck). All industrialization, all technology, all production is now shaped to one aim: to do away with human employment.

And the response to all this horror is to daub all surfaces with a colour not quite crimson for danger, nor cheerful yellow for “wake up and sniff the coffee”. The colour is orange, the mood is grim, the message is get yer head down, bad moon rising. Not the fire next time, the fire this time.


Mike Matthews