Gentle Reader, don’t flee this camo. These colors are, after all, used together to make the wearer one with the earth. This palette’s purposes (killing, control) are secondary. The flowers and peace sign of the ‘60s are freighted symbols too…don’t touch that logo, you don’t know where it’s been. Pacifist earthtones are just commodified camouflage.
Olive Green jubilantly evicts the postcolonial marionette from the acronym O.G. Gangsters are too collegial to be original. Olive Green deserves the acronym more anyway because it’s an anagram for GO.
OG is a worldview embracing environmentalism, but without any of its clichés or dogmas: carbon offsets as secular indulgences, the word “natural” used as “new and improved” once was, driving electric cars to be preachy in ignorance of how their batteries are charged because celebrities are doing it.
Olive Green is vegetarian for efficiency, but would kill and dress its own deer to face carnage with courage if it were to eat meat. OG was furious when the bulk bins disappeared from the co-ops shortly before Whole Foods bought them. OG remembers DIY as common sense: “economic” has its roots in the Greek oikonomikos, “practiced in the management of a household or family.”
OG is accountable. A personal example: I first started working with metal in assemblage sculpture, drilling holes in pieces of metal and bolting them together. I am a self-taught artist and knew my work was mere exercise. Admitting to the electricity I had consumed to produce valueless objects, I engraved the total drilling time into the base of each piece.
Olive Green embraces idealistic doubt and skepticism. Was the ‘60s a victim of its own innocence? The iconic peace sign, an inverted Elhaz (“protection”) rune, could mean vulnerability when overturned – we can’t let that happen again!
Most importantly, OG knows we are here, and together. History has shown we have every faculty and spirit needed to avert disaster; it also suggests that we probably won’t. The only struggle worth waging is for this earth and our unity, and its improbability doesn’t make it any less worthy. Anything less is desertion.
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