No More ‘Yabbadabadoo!’ in the U.S.

Luckas Vander Taelen enjoyed the jollifying Flintstones 50 years ago. Today, the tea party & consorts hold up another mirror for the U.S.

I grew up with the Flintstones. The series ran on the then-BRT [Belgian Radio and Television] at the beginning of the ‘60s. When a cartoon was broadcast, all children sat in front of the TV. There wasn’t much choice: Brussels Flemish was the only existing channel. So everyone watched the same thing, and the next day we spoke about nothing else on the playground. The Flintstones became madly popular in no time, and commerce gladly played on that. If you bought a bottle of Cécémel, you got the Flintstones figures for free. I have never drank that much chocolate milk as in that period.

I have fantastic memories of that series; they are, for me, inextricably connected with my early childhood years. The tune that I sang along with innumerable times still rings in my ears: “Meet the Flintstones. They’re a modern Stone-Age family.” Fred Flintstone taught us our first English lessons, and every week we yelled along with him the unforgettable last words of the credits: “Wilma! Open the door!” And his shout of joy, “Yabba dabba doo!” was the battle cry of the entire first year of study in my Aalst school.

The American Dream

That the series was a smashing success should not be surprising. But other than the stories, it was mainly the framework that made the series so special. By turning the America of that time into a prehistoric parody, the decor became funnier than the scenario. The details were more important than the main storylines: Cars were made out of stone and wood and driven by the feet of Fred Flintstone, who jerked the tail of a bird to honk. Fred operated a dinosaur as a crane in his job in the stone quarries. Other prehistoric animals served as a turntable, a shower or a vacuum cleaner. Wilma washed Fred’s clothes in the beak of a pelican. All modern comfort was transposed to Bedrock, the name of the Flintstones’ town, which means fundamental, the basic principles, the essence.

Because that is what “The Flintstones” was really about: the American Dream. Fred and Wilma Flintstone lived it to the fullest with their neighbors, Barney and Betty. Fred and Barney may have been laborers, but they had a beautiful modern house and a car and fully enjoyed the benefits of the consumption society. Fred and Wilma Flintstone served, with their baby, Pebbles, as the perfect harmonious couple, with a clear man-woman division: Fred was the breadwinner, and Wilma took care of the household. There was no place in Bedrock for the dysfunctional family life of Homer Simpson. Yet, the Flintstones were groundbreaking in moral terms: It was the first animated series in which a double bed was visible in the bedroom of the main characters. That married people also slept together was previously not allowed to be shown in puritan America. As such, prehistoric Bedrock was the harbinger of the sexual revolution in the ‘60s.

Mirror, Mirror …

The world of Fred Flintstone was a mirror of the carefree postwar America that saw the sky as the limit and deemed itself invincible. However, [it was a mirror of] white America, because no blacks or Latinos lived in Bedrock. The series ran from 1960 until 1966, while the American dream slowly started to tatter. The political murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and the Vietnamese nightmare would end that euphoric era.

Who then [that] enjoyed the Flintstones every week — and now watches the series again 50 years later — can [help] but wonder how much the United States has changed. The unbridled optimism and faith in one’s own possibilities of that era have given way to fear and cynicism. The globalization and the financial crisis have caused the feeling of the American nation to slowly degenerate. The tea party movement around the former Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin — along with the Fox TV channel — encourages the distrust toward everything coming from Washington and tries to impair the authority of President Obama in every way possible. The fearful America that shouted, “Yes, we can!” not too long ago seems ripe for that populism of the tea party.

More than 20 percent of Americans still do not believe that Obama has American nationality and suspect a dark conspiracy behind his election. Because he wants to give all Americans health insurance, Obama is for many Americans a crypto-communist. The average American thinks that the right to own a weapon is more important than a generalized health policy. He has become a coward who feels constantly threatened and does not know anymore what the place of his country will be in the new world order.

The idea of the Democratic Party from the ‘60s to turn the U.S. into a great society —with, as [its] end goal, a society without poverty or racism — seems further away than ever. Because of the costs of the wars and the sky-high debts, the American state is not even able to fulfill its most essential duties. Because there is no money to repair some badly damaged roads, the pavement is then all but removed. That way, the government is relieved of its duty to maintain the public roads, because they get degraded to paved country roads. While the investors bring their money en masse into safety in the Asian growth markets, the United States seems to have definitely lost its image as an economic superpower. Americans increasingly fold back into themselves and fear what the future will bring. They no longer dream of a New Frontier like Kennedy nor of the ambitious New Deal of Roosevelt. The only thing that’s left for them is the memory of their glorious past. And the reruns of the Flintstones … the nostalgia of the perished Bedrock, when America still believed in itself and let me, as a young boy, dream.