Yabba Dabba Doo
Read this essay, as published in Watermark in August, 2020
When I was of preschool age, I had an affinity for the
Flintstones. Looking back, it must have been the combination of bright colors
with disparate sounds at varying volumes that held four-year-old me’s
attention. Even today, when flipping through channels, I’m immediately
thunderstruck by Dino’s shrill bark, Wilma’s fluttering giggle, Fred’s prehistorically
Brooklyn-esque,”Bahhhh-neeee,” and Bam Bam’s thunderous, “BAM *pause* BAM.” I
stick around for purple dinosaurs, pepto (rock) pink houses, and bright blue skies. I consumed it with the
same trusting eyes and ears that saw and heard adults in the real-life foreground
as they fed me sugar cubes as treats and spoons-full of Robitussin to sedate
me.
Few family get-togethers pass without reference to that time
when I climbed up on the counter in my grandparents’ kitchen and consumed a
handful of Flintstone’s vitamins. I didn’t poop for a couple days, I’m told
without embarrassment.
I also realize that I never understood a single plot. The
words were nothing more than noises. Piaget and Jung may have other ways of
describing this, but until about the age when we start waking up with indescribable
tingling in mid-lower cores— until we start driving—we are doing little more
than building context for the next seventy years of life’s details.
If we are lucky, that context is shaped by more than 1960s
propogandists. If we are lucky, we have doting parents, aunts, grandparents,
and third grade teachers. If we are lucky, we grow up in a safe suburb and
attend the best schools in the district. If we are lucky, God, country, and
family —even if represented by hand-drawn cartoons set in the fictional
Jurassic—become the context for how we consume medicines for the rest of our
lives: mania, sedation, constipation.
If we are lucky, we are born in America: we are born white:
we are born male and straight.
But there is a set of parallel contexts: absent a blaring tv
in every room, absent cupboards brimming with nutritious victuals, absent bright
green lawns, absent doting adults: absent contexts in which there are reflections
of self-identities on television screens. And there are tangencies: great grandparents who
were forever indentured as sharecroppers in a land with others’ streets paved
in gold. Grandparents who were ghettoized in shanty block homes on the “other
side of Division Street.” Parents who were
allowed to drink only from the “other water fountain.” Selves for whom such
context- shaping influences are present in the current day: parents,
grandparents and great grandparents who were not represented in Bedrock, who
were not even fantastical constructions.
Oh, eventually we had Gazoo, a bussed-in caricature of
otherness—colored AND prissy—for comic relief when Fred and Barney’s
rock-washed antics had petrified.
Hello, DumDum.
We build our context when we are children. We develop our
tastes, our proclivities, our prejudices, our habits, our addictions, and our identities.
We learn how to learn and every image and interaction matters. Our childhood is
the bare cupboard we build into which we eventually order texts: our platters and
glasses and utensils and food and even our Flintstones vitamins. The idyllic,
“modern Stone Age” that sits behind Fred and
Barney’s situational comedics is that context: a cavernous cupboard. At four
years old, we aren’t in control of that context.
We are force fed. The best we can do is throw tantrums that our
context-shapers can either ignore, endure, or enable: sugar cubes and cough
medicine. We may know that we prefer Fruity Pebbles over carrot paste, but we
don’t know that we prefer diversity over exclusion. Thus, we learn to choose
the things we can form opinions on because we are given tangible options. Our parents,
to the extent that they’re around, build our context for us. Media, to the extent
that our parents are not present to interpret loud noise and bright colors into
a socially aware context, builds it. Doctors Piaget and Jung would remind us
that such context may never bubble beyond the barest cupboards of our minds,
but that they do echo there forever.
It’s no accident that a generation who grew up with the
Flintstones, which itself looked back to another imaginary reality, believe
that there was a better time: a time when America (via Bedrock) was “Greater”
than it is today. It’s a marvelous context from an idealized reality that
implicitly excluded representations of parallels and tangencies, where Gazoo
was an odd and curious interloper, not only from another part of town but from
an entirely different dimension.
Thus, this contextual framework came to reify the systems
that needed it. Thus, when a new generation, not raised in the blaring world of
the Flintstones, comes face to face with those of us that did, we decry their
tantrums. Whereas media has worked hard to diversify representational context,
the system itself is much harder to change. The system is more difficult to
change because, just like we weren’t presented options as children between toxic
representation of others and benign diversity, neither are we given an option
today between a system of entrenched and codified prejudice versus an alternate
system that actually works.
We have ability, today, to move The Flintstones from the
fully ahistorical context of our childhoods into the details of our now. We
should move the implicit exclusion into a conversation about explicit inclusion
in a truly modern society. The last
thing we should do is erase them. To the contrary, we need to watch them again.
Sugar cubes have evolved into Adderall and Robitussin into
Xanax. Tantrums have evolved into kneeling and have seeped into the sometimes-doorless
suburban streets of Bedrock. The Flintstones have evolved into Homo Sapien Sapiens.
Maybe our generation should binge-watch some Flintstones
again and try not to purge; if we aren’t compelled to flip the channel, we
should examine our part in perpetuating a context that props up a system
against which our kids and our kids’ kids and our neighbors’ kids feel
powerless to do more than throw tantrums. And if that as a detail, alone,
independent of the context, doesn’t make us hit pause, then we should not be
surprised when tantrums turn into protests and those protests into destruction
of a system that we’ve had countless opportunities to change.
We can change our system over and over. We can continue fighting that fight and
throwing tantrums ad infinitum. Until we change the context, we will never be
anything more than a bunch of spoiled, constipated toddlers hoarding confections-disguised-as-medicine
and yearning for a fictitious past where dinosaurs, mammoths and white men could
coexist but where real, human lives could be imagined away behind hand-drawn
technicolor and laugh tracks.
Read more essays, poetry, and short stories at Momentitiousness.com
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