COLOR WARS

Wasn't it nice of Nancy Pelosi to wear a plum-colored suit to be sworn in, signifying her intent to be speaker of the whole House, not just the Democrats? But the team color thing has its limits: It probably won't work in Iraq.

I think the Colts were playing the Patriots. I might not have noticed, except that they were both wearing blue and white, which seemed weird: Isn't the whole point of team colors to tell you who's on which side? The sports fan in the family pointed out that one team was wearing blue shirts and white pants, while the other was wearing white shirts and blue pants.

Which I could see myself. It just didn't seem right.

Your perennial spring fashion layout on the return of navy blue works on the principle that the navy T and white jeans belong on the same page as the white shirt and navy shorts: They're variations on a theme, two iterations of the same idea.

When a tenor in a white shirt and blue knee breeches and a soprano in a blue bodice and white skirt show up in the first act of an opera, you can be pretty sure that, by the end, they'll be a happy couple -- or anyway, they'll be swearing eternal love in a garret as the soprano coughs out her glorious dying aria. The colors they're wearing create a visual magnetism: You can tell they're meant for each other, and you can feel them being drawn together even if you can't understand the words they're singing.

In both cases, it's the colors that matter; you don't notice which is on top and which is on the bottom, because it's irrelevant. (Well, until you get into remedial fashion, which teaches us to wear the dark color on the bottom to camouflage wide hips, blah blah blah.)

Watching the Colts and Patriots dressed in their nearly identical blue and white, my subconscious kept wanting them to fly into each other's arms, but no: They kept knocking each other down, grabbing each other's face masks, and doing that funny triumphal goose-step run (and sometimes worse) when they scored.

(BTW, how is it that a game so savage that it encourages players to slam into each other at full speed and knock each other down, thereby breaking bones and tearing rotator cuffs and ripping ACLs and concussing heads, is also so politically correct that it penalizes them merely for showing off -- i.e., "illegal celebration" -- when they succeed? Why don't they worry more about crippling injuries and brain damage and less about hurting the losers' feelings? Just a suggestion.)

It must be that playing sports in childhood and adolescence trains you -- via shirts-and-skins P.E. classes and pickup basketball games and informal softball leagues where the only uniform apparel is the team T-shirt -- to see color on top as significant while ignoring color on the bottom. (I guess I could've learned this, but didn't, when we broke into teams in college Phys. Ed. classes, and the girls on one team wore pink apronlike things called "pinnies," short for "pinafores," over their gray pleated gym jumpers and matching bloomers and white blouses.)

In the rest of life, the color of the whole outfit is significant, but it's not always so clear what it signifies.

The other night on TV, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, were discussing the work of their bipartisan Senate committee. Helpfully, Sen. Landrieu wore a sky-blue suit and Sen. Snowe a red one. (OK, you could only see their suit jackets, but I'm guessing their skirts or trousers matched.)

I say helpfully: Presumably, their blue/red split was helpful to people who can remember that the red states vote Republican and the blue states Democratic, because it reminded them that Sen. Landrieu was a Democrat and Sen. Snowe a Republican.

I'm not so good on these binary color distinctions. Sometimes I even have to stop for a second and think to sort the traffic light colors: Oh yes, green means go. I can never remember which states are red and which are blue. For one thing, it's totally counterintuitive for the Republicans to be identified with red, which not that long ago was universally acknowledged to be the color of the godless communists. You'd think the GOP would've insisted on being true-blue.

And what's blue about liberals? Blue can mean true and loyal (true blue), intellectual (bluestocking), salacious (blue movie), aristocratic (blue blood), sad (got the blues), oxygen-deprived (the blue lips and fingernails of hypoxia), excellence (blue ribbon), and probably a dozen other things. How does any of that mean Democrat?

Besides, it's not as if you can count on these color associations to stick. Now everybody knows that you give little blue onesies to boy babies and pink ones to girls, and you just assume it's always been that way. But it hasn't: According to an essay by Jo B. Paoletti and Carol L. Kregloh, infants of both genders wore white dresses until the beginning of the 20th century, when babies began to be dressed in colored rompers. At first, the rule was: "pink for boys and blue for girls." But from 1900 to 1940, "both colors were often used interchangeably." It was only in the 1950s that things settled down into the blue-for-boys-and-pink-for-girls that we now assume is cast in concrete.

Once you know that, how seriously can you take the red state/blue state dichotomy?

On the other hand, think how much less confusing the political situation in the Middle East would seem if we could persuade the Sunni and Shia to adopt team colors. Because I just looked it up, I can tell you that, after the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632 A.D., some of his followers thought his mantle should pass to his best friend; they became the Sunni. Others thought it should go to a member of his family; they became the Shia. I -- like most of the people who run the CIA, according to recent news reports -- will have forgotten which is which by dinnertime.

But suppose the Sunni agreed to wear white, to symbolize inheritance based on spiritual affinity, which has no color, while the Shia opted to wear red, for inheritance based on blood relationship. It would make it so much easier to keep track of who's killing whom. And then if the outside agitators from al-Qaida could be prevailed upon to wear yet another color -- maybe gray, since bin Laden is only a letter away from "leaden" -- things would be clearer still.

It would make their civil war a little more civil. In ours, remember, you could tell who was who because the Union Army wore blue uniforms and the Confederates wore gray, which made it easier for them to kill each other, but also easier for them to avoid killing civilians.

Two problems: Members of the various Iraqi militias probably have no desire to make it easier for their enemies to kill them, and they don't seem to mind killing civilians.

(Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.)

COPYRIGHT 2007 PATRICIA MCLAUGHLIN