Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jim Hodges

There is something almost wistful, and a little combative, in the way Hodges frames color as a kind of uncorrupted language. When he says young people react to color because it is "not screwed up by too many references", he is really praising a form of perception that hasn’t yet been overmanaged by culture wars, taste hierarchies, and the exhausting adult habit of decoding everything into symbolism. Color, in this telling, is direct democracy: it meets you where you are, no credentials required.

The phrasing matters. "Wonderful reaction" is generous, but "screwed up" is deliberately blunt, the diction of someone pushing back on a world that intellectualizes itself into paralysis. Hodges implies that sophistication can be a liability, that accumulating references - art history, ideology, branding, status cues - can turn an immediate experience into a performance of knowing. The line flatters youth, but it also scolds the grown-ups: you’ve learned too much, and now you can’t see straight.

As a politician, that subtext lands as more than an aesthetic observation. It reads like a theory of persuasion. Color becomes a stand-in for any message that bypasses gatekeepers and reaches people viscerally: the appeal of slogans, flags, campaign palettes, even protest signage. Hodges is gesturing toward an electorate that responds to sensation before interpretation, and he’s suggesting that the "pure" response is not childish but powerful. The risk, left unstated, is that what slips past references can also slip past scrutiny.