m&m color conspiracy

As Katie pointed out, the folks behind M&Ms are auditioning new colors — pink, purple, and aqua. This may seem like a simple publicity ploy, an attempt to draw attention to a candy some would say has passed its prime. I say: no. This is a sinister plot, nothing less.
You may remember the last time a new color was added to the M&M menagerie, 1995, when purple, pink, and blue were candidates for entry. The “competition” got all sorts of attention from lemming-like media types. But two salient facts usually go unmentioned:
1. The contest was a fix! Purple and pink are far too close together on the color wheel for voters to successfully differentiate them. The pro-purple/pink axis had its votes split, while blue was allowed to run with the support of a united party. Just as Nader cost Gore the election by splitting the liberal vote, pink cost purple the vote by siphoning off its support, leaving blue to romp to an easy victory. I hate to be cynical, but I wouldn’t be surprised if M&M had already bought huge vats of blue dye when the voting began — the fix was in from the very start.
(One could, I imagine, argue that purple cost pink the election, not the other way around. Highly doubtful to these eyes — I’m not sure America is gay-friendly enough yet to go pink.)
Notice that this time around pink and purple are back in the voting, which will no doubt lead to more Florida-style allegations of vote fraud. But at least blue was a legitimate, strong candidate — aqua is such a spectacularly poor color choice that it’s possible purple could pull it out, despite M&M’s best efforts to keep it down.
2. At NO point during the 1995 election was it made clear that the addition of a new color would come at the expense of one of the old ones. While the charade of a fair election was being forcefed to the American public, M&M executives were secretly plotting the demise of that most noble of M&M colors, tan. Had the question been phrased fairly — “Would you, the American public, prefer that we keep the noble tan in our M&Ms, or would you rather it be summarily replaced with the usurper color of your choice, blue, purple, or pink (even though those last two are awfully similar)?” — the groundswell of tan support would have been earthshattering.
Instead, the public was hoodwinked into thinking they were voting for the addition of a color, not the elimination of an old favorite. It’s as if your mom asked you one day, “Honey, would you like a little brother or sister?” You think about it and say, “Yeah! That’d be great — a new little kid to play with! I wonder which one I’d prefer, a boy or a girl?” Then, a year or so later, along comes your new little baby brother — and next thing you know, Mom’s put you up for adoption, ‘cuz she just don’t need you any more. “Oh, sorry, honey — didn’t I tell you that we were just going to swap you out?”
What isn’t the American public being told this time around? If aqua edges in to the pack, who gets cut out? Who’s next on the chopping block, yellow? It’s sort of tannish, a “boring” color that probably doesn’t have the highest Q rating. Or could it be green? Orange? Brown? I bet blue’s feeling pretty good about itself, but the tide could turn quickly — M&Ms could kill off its young starlet awful quick if it wanted to.
Once Congress is done digging through the corpse of Enron, I demand a full investigation. True, some would call it a fishing expedition, and it could touch on other hot-button issues, like the peanut-butter M&M debacle, the E.T Reese’s Pieces scandal, or perhaps even the Good & Plenty money laundering cases of the early 1980s. But justice must be done. Justice must be done.