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Thursday, August 16, 2012
Shades of Blue
Blue
is the color of the sky and freedom. Also of oceans in murderous mood.
WHAT DO WOMEN KNOW AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT? It started innocently enough. I was trying to address the unexpected appeal Paul Ryan has to women -- verified by my wife, her co-workers, and most recently our own Barbara -- which I suspect is a secret weapon unanticipated by Democrats. I conceived of a definitely NSFW post on the subject and discarded it based on sound advice from a male friend because it was just too, well, blue for this audience. Then my wife suggested a tribute to "Blue Eyes," because women like men with blue eyes, Paul Ryan included. Some examples:
But, hell, that was even more dangerous than my NSFW idea. Laden with potential charges of racism in the current electoral climate. I did some research, found some pictures and interesting web discussions, and finally realized there's more than a political point to be made here. It has nothing to do with race. Blue is just far and away the most interesting color of the spectrum. Because depending on its shade. it contains every human emotion from sunniest optimism to utter despair. Why, just possibly, blue eyes are the most fascinating to members of the opposite sex. There's no way to tell if retinal hue is an actual filter that influences what is seen and how it is processed. Yet the color blue is a cultural obsession anyway.
From "Kind of
Blue" by Miles Davis. Eloquently simple sadness.
Blue but pretty.
You know.
Sweet and
heartbreaking.
If you've seen the
right shade of blue, heaven isn't such a distant concept.
And then there are
"The Blues." Don't give me grief. My blog. My links.
Hold your horses...
...Sex
has
always
been
a
big
part of blue.
See?
Red is hot and passionate and oftimes evil. Green is plants and (these days) dumb bureaucrats. Yellow is French, mustard, and too much sun. Brown is what brown usually is: Providence RI and more bullshit than a man can rake up in a lifetime. Other colors? The eyes of Lincoln and Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan were gray.
Blue is the color of life, the good and the bad, the terrifying and the hopeful. Also endangered because recessive in a world determined to breed differentness away. There's an old idiom concerning the blue eyed boy, which meant "a man who is liked and admired by someone in authority." A rarity. Maybe all those women are onto something, wanting to see through the eyes of life rather than uniform, increasingly collectivist death wishes.
They're probably wrong in the specific. But the rest of us should give some thought to the latent subtext. How do we want to go about living?
Blue Rooms or Blue Skies. Your pick.
