Find Your Own Color, Capitalist Pig

Time was, the only thing we had to fear from color co-option was The Color Council.  And then - with a suddenness that outpaced consumer electronic diode lighting turning uniformly blue several years back - everything broke bad, and broke bad quickly, for the color green.

Like many other troubled people (Robert De Niro mistakenly identified us as 'geniuses' in a movie some time back) I love the color green best of all.  Always have.  May not always will...

I knew something horrible was afoot a few years back when a slobbish, Irish asshole client of mine threw some grunt work my way for a new venture which, for various reasons - not the least of which was sheer ridiculousness - was called Green Rock Energy.

Goldman Sachs was involved.

That wasn't the worst of it.

Ever heard of clean coal?  Ever seen any?  Green Rock Energy?  Jesus Christ.  How many times (generally from one of their employees) have you heard the blather about Goldman only hiring the smartest people in the world? Maybe geniuses do like green.  I certainly wouldn't know (and from what I've heard about Bobby De Niro, he wouldn't either.)  In retrospect I suppose I take some comfort from the fact that Green Rock Energy (ticker symbol might have been... GRE - as in, the first three letters of 'greed') never got off the ground.  Not Goldman's version at any rate.  There is some Australian outfit (presumably run by geniuses every bit as genuine as those in New York) which also tried the bituminous coal/color green route to separating widows and orphans from their money.  I'm not sure if the guys down under are doing any good with it.  And finding out would involve tedium that I just can't summon the energy (if I may...) to discover.

So I'm digressing and mashing up my contempt with Goldman Sachs with my contempt for every other asshole out there trying to pay the bills by abusing my favorite hue with an abandon which would make Edward Bernays blush.  Why green for god's sake?  One would suppose that it has something to do with botany.  Does this connection between 'green' and 'we're still going to poison your sorry ass, but we're going to pull the trees and grasses into the fight, OK?' have an off switch?

Driving through the Energy Capital of the World the other afternoon, I noted a sign hawking 'Green Apartments.'  I'm not sure if what made this inner-loop GenY hive 'green' was the smallish amount of wood in the formaldehyde soup sometimes called particle board but I literally stopped to see if I could find anything environmentally friendly.  Looked a whole lot like all the other human filing cabinets without green billing.  Maybe the green dye in the Tyvek insulation is enough to convince prospective residents that the formaldehyde, plastics and verdant shades of dye are, at long last, being embraced not only by developers - but by the earth itself?

I couldn't get there.

The magnitude of irony inherent in a staunch Republican real estate mogul trumpeting 'green-ness' is not small. No such word as green-ness?  I'll look into it, scan a few construction billboards and get back to you. In the race to lease up hermetically sealed 'apartment homes' (all the better to infuse lessees with long chain carbon molecules - but just the green ones) there is is a frenzy which occults the notion that the green we may be hearing about is more closely related to the color of money.

I guess I could agitate for the abolishment of the EPA while simultaneously trick-fucking my inferiors with the word green into giving me (green) cash for the privilege of breathing formaldehyde fumes and sinking their toes into the luxurious - yet plastic - plush carpets.  I guess I could even sleep at night.  I think I would have some strange dreams though.

These matters are at once baffling and... completely clear.  The hypocrisy in pursing the long green through misuse of the botanical green is simply another expression of faith in the notion that "if you're not growing your business - you're dying."  There's another earth tone that's been used to similar effect in the long march of capitalism.

Brown.

The color of bullshit.



M. Lee
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