Threat Level Orange
In my mind, the black-and-white era of news photography ended on September 11. I see the front page of the New York Times that morning, an image of the blue sky framing two gray buildings whose rows and columns resemble a newspaper’s. One of the buildings is being pierced by an airplane, or what was recently an airplane. I don’t see the collision itself — only the remnant of the plane and the orange fire bursting back toward the viewer.
None of this is historically accurate. The orange fire could not have appeared in the paper that morning, and in any case the photos of September 11 weren’t the first use of color on the front page of the Times. That shift occurred four years earlier. The front page for October 16, 1997, features two color photos, one of a pale gray Cleveland Indians uniform, the other of Janet Reno in a dark gray outfit testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee. With the exception of a coach in a red jacket, everything in the photos is decidedly muted. It’s as if in its initial approach to a bright new world, the Gray Lady wanted to stay gray.
As far as my own up-close memories of September 11, they’re limited. I remember walking half a block down State Street in Brooklyn to Flatbush Avenue, where I could see people staggering home from Lower Manhattan covered in white dust, looking like zombies. There is probably a photograph of that ghostly parade somewhere, but even in my own mind I have to strain to recall the image because my false memory of the newspaper photo is so powerful. The gray buildings, the blue sky, the orange burst — I’m sure I saw it on the front page of the Times the following day. I saw it then and kept seeing it again and again, for years to come, as the image was transmuted into an emblem, something that could stabilize an insane moment, assimilate chaos and turn it into history. The gray skyscrapers and the gray smoke take up most of the photo. Their colorlessness aligns with the adjacent columns of text, establishing a shared grid which pulls the image toward the realm of documentation — but the orange is always there, bursting through the visual record.
The orange of that photo soon began to metastasize. First it was a fire, then it was a color, and before too long it became a regime unto itself. We would, it quickly became clear, have to yield to orange, understand our place within it. I’d like to try to reconstruct that process, the orangification.
You learn about ROYGBIV in elementary school, and if that’s your first encounter with color theory, your second is learning about the warm and cool sides of this spectrum. Warms indicate heat, but also, more abstractly, increasing levels of danger. The traffic signal moves from green to yellow to red. Posters related to weather conditions or evacuation protocols teach us that green and other cool tones mean safe, while red is unsafe. Red alert, Code Red, Red Scare, the red button, red card, the red phone, “Red means run, son.”
In the months after September 11, this rubric was repurposed to quantify terror threats to the United States, and to suggest the appropriate level of vigilance required to mitigate them. In March 2002, the Bush Administration unveiled the infamous Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS), with orange — “High Risk of Terrorist Attacks” — second from the top. In elementary school didactics, threats are usually paired with suggested courses of action: In a tornado, seek shelter in the room closest to the interior. In a fire drill, head outside. For the Department of Homeland Security, stating the threat levels was sufficient. The point was to announce on a regular basis that the levels were high — but not “Severe,” because law enforcement was doing its job. This ambient, lingering orange signaled that emergency was continuous, a new way of living. The HSAS chart became standard fare on cable news and at airports, where you knew you just had to get in line, because of safety. The orange era had arrived.
Things you thought had no color — your weekend, your career, your emotions — these things are turning orange too.
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More than the remnant of the airplane or the posters at airports, the orange that lingers most in my mind from that time is the carceral orange of Guantánamo: the bright orange of prisoners’ jumpsuits as they sat handcuffed behind chain-link fences, kneeling in groups, were led around in lines. As with the more recent photos of CECOT detainees in El Salvador, the Guantánamo photos we saw could only point to the even greater horrors immediately outside the frame. No one other than the guards and their victims saw that violence, but I imagined it happening, a mental amalgam of fictionalized scenarios from television and the shocking torture trophies that emerged from Abu Ghraib.
When I went back to those Abu Ghraib images recently, I was surprised to find scarcely any orange jumpsuits. I’d remembered the official Guantánamo photos and the clandestine Abu Ghraib photos both splashed with bright orange — orange against the fencing, orange against the dark shadows of the prison cells, orange crouching on the ground. What I saw in the torture photos, however, were prisoners cloaked in black or stripped bare to their underpants. The orange didn’t feature. My brain must have filled in the jumpsuits because their color was a through line connecting what was happening in Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib and black sites across the Middle East and Europe. It was a shorthand, a way for me to understand this new regime of state-sanctioned torture: orange as the new law.
The Orange of Signification
It goes without saying that your orange may not be my orange. Still, I’d like to think there’s a range we have in common — something that gets us to think orange and not rust or red ocher or red. In all the images I’ve discussed so far, you could switch out and rearrange the various tones and it wouldn’t matter very much. Explosion orange and Guantánamo orange are different, but they are also just orange, nameable as orange and memorable as orange. This is the orange of signification, the orange that floats just above the orange you actually experience.
President Orange
Emerging from the war on terror years into the Obama era, one could imagine shrill and scary orange giving way to the bipartisan purple of “no red states or blue states” — to a gentle and inclusive mood of compromise. I confess that I did hope for something like that at the time. I was looking for some reasonableness. But this aspirational purple was always going to pose a problem. Anyone who has mixed red and blue tempera paints, or watched kids do it, can tell you that the resulting color is disappointingly grayed out. Obama’s bipartisanism yielded a similar effect. And so we were soon returned to orange.1
President Cheeto, the Orange Menace, the Manchurian Cantaloupe, Mango Mussolini: Trump couldn’t possibly be more associated with orange. I’d like to be able to skip Trump’s orangeness because it’s too lib, too cringe, too obvious. But the coloristic situation is more complicated than “orange man bad,” so I think it needs to be taken beyond caricature and mockery — tactics that don’t, as it happens, penetrate orange at all.
Trump’s orange makeup is at home in the visual universe of network news, where all skin, male and female, is shellacked with foundation. But Trump’s makeup sets itself apart by being consistently, perplexingly bad. It’s been well documented that Trump is partial to his poor application, a spray-tanned raccoon effect that spares his eyes, neck, and mouth and leaves a ring of pale pink at the edges. The orange, meanwhile, is laid on so thick it makes one think of drag queens and geishas, figures for whom conspicuous makeup is the entire point.2
At first glance, RFK Jr. ’s own alarming tan seemed like it might impinge upon Trump’s color trademark. Kennedy could have taken the pale path of whiteness, but he apparently adheres to the white-ethnic belief that tan = good, even if, for his particular line of white ethnics, the Irish, this is a dangerous choice. RFK Jr. ’s tan, like Trump’s, sets him apart from other politicians, and from other members of his family. But his variegated beef-jerky tone, whether produced via the “natural” tanning bed or the natural sun, cannot upstage the artificially pure hue Trump employs. My contacts in the White House aren’t as strong as they could be, but I suspect that RFK Jr. ’s hard-won melanin never threatens Trump’s position as the supreme orange. Can you imagine any man in Trump’s circle daring to copy his makeup? The Florsheims, sure. But not the tan.
We know that we’re in a bad stage and that the orange will continue to deepen — and still we’re reassured that we’re not yet at red, which would mean, presumably, “truly cooked.”
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And so we have to acknowledge the utter singularity of Trump’s coloration, his orange supremacy, while also seeing how it is very regular and low, part of a working-class drag routine familiar to people who were raised on heavy mascara, televangelism, and professional wrestling. The orange evokes the beaches of a place like Mar-a-Lago — but we never see Trump on the beach, so his makeup in fact points to Queens, or to the part of Trump we call “Queens.” This is emphatically an outer-borough orange, a bad-taste orange, emanating from the most mocked zones of white culture. Whatever “quiet luxury” is, this is the opposite.
Orange man must therefore be understood as a version of the redneck. Or an inversion: If the working-class sunburn was a signifier of undignified exposure to the elements, of a kind of déclassé white, the spray tan promises to reverse and redeem all that. It’s not real, or earned, in the way that a sunburn is. The outdoors doesn’t do it to you; you do it to yourself — as befits the petit bourgeois who is his own boss. It doesn’t roast you when you’re looking down at your work. You apply it when you’re looking forward to your leisure. You may not live at the beach, not yet, but the fake tan means you’re ready when you get there. You burn, but you have not been burned — that is the whiteness of this orange.
Trump’s orange effect obviously extends beyond his face. For all his counterintuitive attention to his makeup, his aptitude for the orange of perpetual crisis is even more astonishing. It transfixes us all to varying degrees. I think most of the globe is in some way experiencing the consequences of his appetite for verge-of-catastrophe governance. Trump didn’t invent incompetence, inequality, misinformation, or war, but he revels in all of these with a heedlessness distinct from the dutiful procession of previous regimes, which had to organize entirely new bureaucracies to keep everyone in line. Trump splashes around in the orange spectacle while the rest of us drown in it.
Catastrophe Orange
The first Covid map of the US I remember seeing, on March 20, 2020, was an amazingly abstract thing. It was actually three maps, stacked in ascending levels of orange on my phone. The map at the bottom showed what infection rates would likely be if we took every Covid precaution: mainly white, with faint blushes of orange around the big cities. The second image, in the middle of the screen, mapped out the results of “some precautions” and was a mottle of orange and white. The third map, with orange and deeper orange saturating the country, showed us a scenario where we took no precautions at all. The maps weren’t contentless — they were based on actuarial data and public health policies — but the Goldilocks trio of good, medium, and bad struck me as too generalized to influence anyone’s behavior.
It was an entirely different story when the real-time global maps hit. I checked them regularly. Initially I wanted to know if Chicago, where I lived, would see any cases, and soon enough I moved on to figuring out where in the city those cases had materialized. As things got worse, I weighed the maps against other, more immediate signals: ambulances driving past the house, friends and relatives posting on social media about their own Covid statuses, other friends and relatives dying, the highly variable level of sanity in my immediate family. In the first part of lockdown, the Covid maps still functioned in a comparative register, as comments on my surroundings. Later, as external data points became scarcer, I began living inside the orange map.
Eventually that map started to provide its own forms of leisure and distraction. I would zoom in and roam around Illinois, looking at the paler (safer) counties and then exploring what kinds of parks they had. Then, as the vaccines started to roll out, I began contemplating more ambitious trips. Who could we visit first? What might be a safe vacation destination? Let’s check the map. How about this sabbatical year I have coming up — what countries have been handling this well? We considered Ecuador, where I am from, and compared Quito to some more rural areas. We considered Poland, where my wife is from, and weighed the map against what her family was telling us. When we finally decided on Germany, I kept checking the map for shades of orange, zooming in as far as I could to scope out specific neighborhoods in Berlin.
At this point I was mentally mapping in orange, developing and fine-tuning my plans in orange, arguing with my relatives about what shade of orange was probable over the holidays (Creamsicle? Apricot? Carrot? Inferno?), trying to protect relatives’ fragile health with an appeal to dark orange. I did eventually contract Covid in Berlin, right before Christmas, when we were scheduled to get on a train. It wasn’t the map that told me, of course, because the map necessarily lags behind reality. I had a sore throat and fatigue that I could only describe as “different.” I got tested at the site around the corner, and there went our Christmas plans. I had joined the orange, would now contribute to an intensification of orange.
The Covid virus itself, it must be said, was represented in images as red — so much so that Forbes ran a piece entitled “No, the Covid-19 Coronavirus Is Not Actually Red.” In the Covid maps, the redder the orange got, the closer you were to the red virus. For me this was the moment when orange officially shifted from its position between yellow and red and tilted into “approaching red.” Orange had been its own color, in the same place for centuries, ever since Newton discovered the visible spectrum. But the danger spectrum, now the dominant one, implies that colors must inevitably move in one direction or another, because the conditions they describe are changing. With a weather map, as with a Covid map, you check to see the direction of the vector. Is the rain subsiding? Are case numbers going down on the North Side? During lockdown, however, the sense that things might get better or worse day-to-day was supplanted by an overall picture of mounting crisis, of things getting worse all the time. It is tempting to blame this feeling on the epidemic of doomscrolling, our collective immersion in the grim and the tragic, or to see it as a momentary response to the grim tragedy we all witnessed at that time. But to me the shift was something more primal, a long-delayed collective recognition that the bad was real. It could get worse, and it would.
This is emphatically an outer-borough orange, a bad-taste orange, emanating from the most mocked zones of white culture.
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Long before the Covid maps, there were the climate maps, which almost always presented past, current, and future conditions as a yellow-to-red spectrum of increasing peril. If they showed you, in a time lapse, how global temperatures were changing, the colors moved from cool ones to warm ones: yellow, orange, red. If they showed you the current, record-breaking conditions, county by county, the map would be a bright orange verging on red. If they told you how things would develop if greenhouse gas emissions went up, the map was again very orange.
The climate catastrophe we inhabit sits uneasily between the real-time map era and the predictive map era. The worst is yet to come, and we don’t know what to do about it — or perhaps we feel like we don’t know, because we haven’t been able to do anything about it. As familiar as they are, these orange maps can only depict a rehearsal, a prelude. In the pre-vaccine moment the Covid maps were terrifying, but examining them, you could imagine a future after orange. One feels very different looking at the climate maps. There is no de-escalating from orange.
Orange achieves its full form with the enduring emergency of the climate crisis. I cannot think of a better color for it, but at the same time it feels woefully inadequate. We know that we’re in a bad stage and that the orange will continue to deepen — and still we’re reassured that we’re not yet at red, which would mean, presumably, “truly cooked.” Sometimes I think we are already in permanent red, that orange is lying to us — or that orange is the shade of our cruel optimism, our denial.
Orange Atmosphere
In The Culture of Yellow: Or, the Visual Politics of Late Modernity, Sabine Doran argues that fin de siècle yellow signaled newness and stigma and scandal, which in turn defined the age. Clearly, I’ve revealed myself to be a person eager to think colorfully about history, but while Doran marshals an impressive amount of yellow evidence — Van Gogh’s famous sunflowers, the yellow stars in the Jewish ghettos, many yellows in European literature — I couldn’t quite see how all this managed to color-code the era. Perhaps I wanted to be convinced that people at the time also saw their own moment as yellow. Maybe for Doran it is enough that we see it as yellow in retrospect.
What came to mind for me was the faint yellow haze that floats over impressionist paintings. The impressionists were committed to capturing specific places at discrete moments, but cumulatively what they documented was early industrialism, the smoke and steam and smog that engulfed northern Europe. They were looking, above all, at atmosphere. A lot of impressionism is blue and green and gray, but there is often a yellow scrim — a yellow that supersedes the incidental color of the sunflowers or the saturated hues Gauguin saw in Tahiti — a kind of overarching yellow that marks the era as the beginning of the Anthropocene.
Once, in the late ’90s, a few years before the dawn of the orange era, I found myself in Montreal for a friend’s wedding. There was a wildfire nearby, and I remember trying to capture the eerie effect of the atmosphere turning orange with the disposable cameras that had been handed out to all the guests. The resulting pictures looked underexposed and nothing more, the otherworldly orange haze rendered mostly regular gray.
So, decades later, in 2023, when photos of smoke from yet another Canadian wildfire began to appear on social media, I was surprised by how well digital photography had captured what had proved so elusive in the late disposable-camera era. The best civilian shot I saw was of the scenery through a window. The cool interior lighting framed the orangeness outside, in the same way that you might frame a sunset, except that instead of a bright band of orange light at the horizon, this orange was everywhere, pressing at all the edges of the window frame and probably trying to get in through the cracks. In another image I saw a gray cat sitting on a windowsill, apparently unperturbed by the wide expanse of horror just behind it.
The most effective presentation of the orange haze was a quadrant of four images of the New York skyline that appeared in the Times on June 7, 2023, taken by a high-res webcam at 10:02 am, 11:56 am, 12:53 pm, and 1:53 pm. The first photo shows an ordinary city backlit by a pale blue sky, business as usual with some boats trailing wakes in the river and cutting through the serene reflection of the skyline. By 11:56, you can tell that something is very wrong, with the sky turning an unnatural yellow and the buildings losing all differentiation. You can still spot a boat in the foreground, but beyond that, it’s hard to say what’s happening. By 12:53, the palette is fully pastel. Where do the buildings end and the atmosphere begin? It’s hard to say. By the fourth picture, taken a mere four hours after the first, the city is unrecognizable. There is no skyline to speak of, no boats, no time of day.
I stared at this crazy, apocalyptic quadrant for years before I realized it reminded me of a Monet. At first I assumed that I was responding to the superficial similarities — the pastel palette and the fact that, as with Rouen Cathedral or the haystacks, the subject was re-presented in different conditions, so you could understand that the changing light was the work’s true subject. Later I realized that this Times photo illustration was the cataclysmic continuation of the impressionists’ encounter with industrialization, culminating — as modernist painting did — in full monochrome.
Another image in the Times presented the orangeout day by day, with two pictures: Tuesday and Wednesday. The Tuesday looks like any Tuesday: a regular skyline, the greenish river, blue sky, some clouds overhead. Wednesday is from another planet: an orange rectangle with a whisper of forms somewhere deep inside. I showed the picture to a friend, who said, “I can picture the Thursday.” I wrote this down because I liked the sound of it, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that even if he could picture the Thursday, I cannot. The best I can do is an assembled mental montage of crops scorched by heat, mega-mega-hurricanes, famous cities half underwater — but that’s just the apocalyptic trailer for what’s coming, not the actual, unending movie. The totality of the orange, the fact that it can totally envelop us, makes it hard to see what lies beyond it in any kind of detail. In the end, you stop seeing the future at all.
Dream Orange
In a dream, I go to Home Depot. The big-box store, the loading zone of orange, feels like a huge stage. You know how it is. Homeowners play the leading role, and I see them there, wandering around, eyes glazed. I may be one myself, with a problem or a project I am trying to resolve. Someone whispers to me, You are the protagonist of American real estate. You are the Y in DIY. You will belong here. But the other people seem to know so much more about where things are, about what is happening, about where you can find an orange bucket, or what to even do with an orange bucket. I notice they have their own checkout area, their own carts, their own protocols. These pros, they are moving at a different pace, truly inhabiting the Home Depot orange, buzzing around in hi-vis vests. Where have I seen the hi-vis before? I can’t remember, then I do. Workers. They are workers. Do I have the right hinge or the right beam for the project? Did I buy an orange apron or perhaps some orange gloves? What kind of time is it? I wander the parking lot looking for my car. I can’t remember what color it is, but it’s a RAV4, I know that much. It used to be black. There is a police surveillance contraption there, a sad metal tower, playing Mozart. I still can’t find my car. The car isn’t orange, shut the fuck up. Where are the day laborers — maybe they will know? I talk to one guy in my childhood Spanish, but he is faded, like a ghost. He says there was a raid, everyone is scared now, nothing will be fixed.
Orange Praxis
The things I’ve written here could be illustrated by the meme where the guy is connecting everything on his corkboard with crisscrossing red strings, except that obviously my strings would be orange. I know that what I’m saying sounds insane. But hear me out: What I am presenting is the opposite of a conspiracy. I don’t think all these orange things are secretly connected and carefully executed by some cabal behind the scenes; it’s all out in the open and fully chaotic, unfolding right in front of everyone. I suppose the counterproject then is to avoid misperceiving the emergency. We are caught in what appears to be a bind. There is an actual emergency, but just screaming “emergency” again and again isn’t going to get us anywhere, especially considering that emergencies are desirable conditions for autocrats. So for now I’m proposing a calming color meditation. Just focus on the orange, see where it goes, accept and acknowledge what it brings.
I realize that the orange encompasses so, so much. It can feel overwhelming, hard to process. You start off thinking that at least there are some safely non-orange things out there and so you take refuge in them — but you can’t, not really. At some point everything will come into contact with emergency. The orange is already seeping in. Things you thought had no color — your weekend, your career, your emotions — these things are turning orange too. Accept it. At first it’s like looking straight at the sun, I know. But your mind’s eye will eventually adjust. Trust that there has to be something after orange.
Already the danger spectrum is moving beyond red. Just today, a friend sent me a post by a meteorologist, Jeff Berardelli, who writes, “The Mediterranean Sea #heatwave is so severe, I ran out of colors in my color table.” The peripheral areas on his map are the familiar yellow-to-red, but the center, the Mediterranean, is purple. Some of it is even going white, which I suppose is a sign of spectrum overload, or maybe the ascendance into some kind of afterlife.
Does the emergence of a supra-red spectrum mean that we have reached peak orange? Is orange the new baseline now, the new green and blue? Climactically and epidemiologically, we have already entered red. Politically, it is harder to tell. The red of barbarism is everywhere, the red of Mars is emerging as a pseudo-solution, but what about the red of socialism?
Maybe we can imagine a pure red field, a condition of orange being over? Breathe into the red. The orange is behind you. Try to stay with the red. Let me tell you the story of how the left became red. Keep picturing red. In 1791, during the Champ de Mars massacre, when Parisian authorities raised the red flag of emergency announcing the start of martial law, the Jacobins appropriated this banner and flew a red flag of their own, referencing the blood of protesters who had been killed. Keep picturing the red. The new red flags of the Jacobins declared “the martial law of the people against the court.” Stay with the red, stay with it. The rhetoric of authoritarian rule has since been refined to the point that they keep us in a near-red condition, constantly flying the orange banner in various ways, in our media, on our leader, on our phones. Maybe it’s time to call it red and grab their flag?
It is interesting to place Obama’s rhetorical voting-map purple on a continuum with the canonical purples of Black culture: The Color Purple’s purple, the Showtime Lakers’ purple, Prince’s Purple Rain, and Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” A once hopeful purple, now melancholy and faded? ↩
I have seen it written that Trump goes heavier on the makeup when he’s stressed out, upping the garishness the same way he approaches his other coping mechanisms, like overloading on McDonald’s, posting on Truth Social, and starting new grifts. Which isn’t to say that Trump is the first person to derive mental stability from a semirational ritual of self-presentation. (I, for example, like to mess up my hair a bit before I leave the house, lest anyone think I’m trying too hard.) ↩
