$head Beige Is the Color of Evil

Beige is the Color of Evil

Beige is the color of evil. Most of the time, the first thing that happens when I mention this is that people look at me incredulously and wonder what in the world I could possibly be thinking.

I thought I would take this opportunity to explain.

Most people think that, if colors have attributes such as good or evil, that the color of evil is either the red of arterial blood gushing from a wound, or the deepest black of the darkest night sky. While these are certainly evil colors, they are not as evil as beige.

(A note: those who do not believe that colors can be good or evil in themselves are probably cultural relativists and therefore not worth listening to. They have not read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind often enough. For those of you who haven't read it, the thesis of The Closing of the American Mind is that anybody who takes their values from what's going on today, rather than to what the Founders of the Republic said 200 years ago, and who believes that different people have different values and that the values of the Founders should not be taken as the only possible model, must have a closed mind.)

These other evil colors can be evil, but in one respect they are not completely evil -- they are obviously evil. That is, if you have a devil-figure clad in blood-red, any three-year-old knows not to approach it or be doomed.

The most evil color has to appear benign -- has to look, at least, harmless, until the forces of evil can overwhelm the good. Evil cannot completely take on the appearance of good -- but it can come close. Evil cannot be the purest white of the driven snow -- but it can be beige.

This is why beige, and off-white, and buff, and so on, are really the colors of evil.


(Some people insist on seeing this as some kind of racial reference. It was never intended to refer to people at all -- but if you insist on seeing it that way, isn't the color of so-called "white" people really just an approximation of white -- just as beige is?)


Wow, I'm famous, at least for values of "famous" that include Cabinet magazine. I don't know why I only find out about these things years after they happen.