Color me unsurprised

/

David Strom on the latest exercise in liberal preening

Not having lived in any other timeline, I can't be certain that the one we live in is THE most absurd in existence. 

But it must be in the ballpark. 

Pantone is a company that does...colors. Literally, that is their business, and I suppose it's good that somebody does. I knew there was something called Pantone, because I have been in a Home Depot looking at paint, but I guess I never thought about the fact that there is an actual company that focuses on...whatever exactly Pantone does, which my wife reliably informs me that it does a lot of it. 

One of the many important things that Pantone does is predict what they call the "color of the year," which is apparently a trendsetter more than a trend predictor because people like my wife, interior designers, and a type of gay man we all know and love care quite a bit about what Pantone says it should be.

I hope it isn't "Avocado" again anytime soon. 

Well, this year Pantone has, for the first time ever, chosen a shade of white as the color of the year. And predictably, this has set off a firestorm about Trump, Sydney Sweeney, and whether some version of brown should have been chosen as a political statement about white supremacy during the Trump years. 

I give you...Cloud Dancer, the color of the year:

The reaction was fast and furious:

I am not making this up, or blowing the issue out of proportion. The controversy is being covered in The New York Times, Forbes, ArtNews, and, I am sure, many other places. I could check, but I am turning a shade of Avocado thinking too much about this. 

Now I will freely admit that "Cloud Dancer" doesn't blow my socks off, although picking that as the name of a slightly bluish shade of white was a stroke of genius. If what you are selling is boring, give it a great name, and maybe that will help. Ironically, last year's color was some version of brown that everybody called "babys**t brown," which tells you that the choice didn't appeal to the masses, but again, I am not interested enough to look it up. 

Liberals keep claiming that ordinary people are obsessed with race, and that people of pallor cannot quit dividing the world between those of us with lighter (read PINKish) skin and people with more melanin. This seems odd, because I doubt that anybody who just saw a swatch of "Cloud Dancer" would ever have thought, "Hey, that looks like me."

Well, except for albinos, who come in all races, I think, and Irish people, who sure do look really pale to me. However, that isn't so true if they go to the beach, where they eventually turn a shade of lobster red, and they give up on using men's soap for a week until they start to heal. 

(FWIW) This is really all about posturing — silly, stupid people making themselves feel better and morally superior by boasting to their friends just exactly how enlightened they are. This woman is the perfect example: