The Hate

   Do you remember the days when everything about TV was wonderful?  Do you remember how every cartoon was not only magical, but good?  How this was so, just by the marvel of animation, not like today where institutions like the Cartoon Network allow all manner of cartoons to play. Do you recall how you would sit in front of the television and wait impatiently for the next time Samantha would wiggle her mouth, when the fun would really start?  How you would silently wish for that kind of power the next time some bully was picking on you or you just couldn’t get your homework done?

    I can remember those days, the days when everything about such shows was goodness and wonderful.  When I was under the age of eleven I think I may have only seen the Flintstones and Bewitched four or five times each.  This was due to the one channel that my hometown was limited to at the time. But when we traveled to the other places, civilized places, with real television, I can remember the sense of awe that both of these programs could instill in me. I would sit, in a state of rapt fascination, staring at the screen for the entire half hour, commercials included.

    How could anything else even begin to compare with these two programs?  On the one hand you have dinosaurs for every single household appliance, a car that your feet can make go and the unbridled enthusiasm of Fred’s hearty, ‘Yabba Dabba Doo!’  On the other, you have the world’s best mother, firm but generous, who with a twitch of her mouth could give you a pony, a sundae or turn your ugly tongue-sticking-out cousin into a toad.  Both of these programs held a simple sort of magic for me, one that tied directly into my own sense of whimsy and dreaming.  To me these shows epitomized what was good about the universe.  Not that wiggling your lip can bring you breakfast or that your kitchen faucet might regularly trumpet and talk back, but rather that a healthy, creative imagination is a thing of value and using it will enrich and broaden your life.

    Not very long after I turned eleven my town underwent a grand and marvelous change.  We got a satellite dish.  All of a sudden we went from the one, local, station, to getting a number of stations, including channels from such exotic locals as Chicago (WGN), L.A. (KTLA) and Hamilton (CHCH). Ok, some weren’t quite as exotic as others.  One of the things I might have most hoped for was to come true. I would get to see Flintstones and Bewitched practically every day.  Not three or four times in a row every second year, but once every day. I might have been too young for these words but the concept was definitely with me, ‘the world is a grand and beneficent place.

     My bliss, however, wasn’t to last forever.  My perfect dream was going to come to a crashing halt.  You see it wasn’t very long after this that I formed an intense, lifelong hatred of these two shows.  I can’t tell you for sure how long this journey from love to hate took me, but it happened at least within a couple of years.  It didn’t start out as hatred, that had to grow.   Long before my hatred my love would be sullied by the anger these two programs made me feel.  

    For many people it is easy to pick their favourite character in the Flintstones.  Fred is, after all, very much the main character in all respects, being the big lovable dumb lummox he is intended to be.  You can understand as you watch him do things that only an idiot would assume to be a good idea that this is just part of who he is.  And even if you try to dig deeper you can begin to understand that Fred has always been meant to be an image in satire of the overbearing, super macho male.  I am sure, that as I began to watch this show, this was too, how I viewed Fred. 

    But then things began to change.  Not in Fred, practically by definition he must remain eternally the same.  Rather within myself.  I began to notice the way that Fred treated his wife and family.  This, by all means, wasn’t an instant process, in part because they had a habit of taking Fred and occasionally showing you the amount that he cared for his family.

    In the end, though, I could not be fooled. Fred is not a good person.  He doesn’t respect anyone around him, letting his anger be the general fuel and method for all communication.  He literally commands his wife and daughter to obey his will at his loudest bellow.  Not only does he do this, when they act, in any way that is not congruent with his current thought pattern, he flips his lid.  This fact is worsened by the fact that his thought processes are so backwards, so nearly insane and subject to such instant complete reversal that it would be impossible to predict then and react in the manner he desires.  And that’s if he only knew what he desired.

    Don’t mistake me, I am not calling Fred a physically violent man, I don’t think I ever saw Fred be violent in any way to his family.  They also, to some extent, go to an effort, through the life of this cartoon, to demonstrate that Fred is at best an inept fighter.  However, what can you believe he is capable of when his only method of convincing his best friend to do things is the threat of bodily harm?  This he does almost constantly.  If anything, I would say that the threat is Fred’s primary resource for communication.

    As my respect for Fred wavered, my anger at the way he treated people grew.  “Wilma is not a broken television; please do not yell at her like one.  Slavery is a post caveman time invention, please stop ordering her about like that.  Yes, Fred, women do have a brain.  Yes, Fred screaming is not the best way to demonstrate your love.”  At some point my own anger; my own need to protect the people that Fred was bullying, and make no mistake this is the only word for Fred, bully, raised to the point where hatred began to form.  I guess that you can try to say that it is satire, all in good fun.    I even understand this and have trouble arguing that it is untrue. But it doesn’t matter, I need a basic level of human respect to be happy, and Fred just doesn’t make the grade.

    If you think that my level of reaction to Fred is rather severe, you should see it when it focuses on Darren Stevens.  Good old Darren, poor mortal married to a loving, beautiful, smart, funny woman who just happens to be a witch to boot.  Yeah, good old Darren!  Except for the fact that there is no better person anywhere for jumping first to a conclusion and then into a rage.  No one, who with complete disregard for any sort of explanation can make an assumption better than he.  I don’t know what Age of Man Darren is from, but what kind of one must it be where the man not only makes constant unfair demands, but also expects these command to be carried through in a cheerful manner.

    His manner is imperious and unless happy because he is finally getting his way, almost always in a state of anger. Not only is every command supposed to be as if from the mouth of God herself, but he would expect himself obeyed first.  There is truly nothing about this sometimes kind and genial person that is not selfish and self-serving. 

    To me, a relationship is a thing of beauty because above all else it is a product of compromise.  It is two people who have decided to be together because the idea of being apart is unbearable and unthinkable.  Through this need to be with one another you share your wants and needs to the point where you can then be together.  In short, a union of love induced compromise, the very soul of civilized being in my eyes.

    Try looking for this notion in Bewitched.  Compromise?  I dare you to find any sort of compromise.  Sure you have sacrifice, you have Samantha giving up her culture, her heritage, her family, her powers and her birthright.  Have her children ostracized by there own father for the same reasons.  Teaching them that part of their inherent self-hood is evil and must be quashed.  Instead having the male part of your parental union trying to show them that he is indeed the person who is making the sacrifices.  I know that you don’t have to like your in-laws, but to treat them with utter contempt and revulsion just for existing is a little beyond acceptable in my books.

    In the best of cases my ire is raised at the notion of any person treating another with anything less than the respect a person deserves.  Deserves for no other reason than that they are a person.  This doesn’t even touch upon the respect someone you love enough to have married is warranted.   Every day that I watched this show I saw Darren order Sam about more and more irrationally.  Showing his own will, his own wants and desires to be the only ones that were of any consequence. Treating his family worse than I would treat a stray dog that had attacked my daughter.  How could this not bring me to anger?

    One possible answer to the problem of this show was that I could just stop watching.  I have.  I don’t watch either of these shows anymore.  If, on occasion I do happen to catch one here or there, the anger doesn’t even come back right away.  All of a sudden I will once again find myself being immersed in something that I am bound to love.  The bad parts of the Fred and Darren characters are a small part of these shows, something that I sometimes feel that I should be able to overlook.  But then, out of nowhere, they will explode into a fit of irrational anger and I am forced to relearn a lesson of times past.

    I have heard the arguments before; it’s just a TV show, it’s only a cartoon, how can you take it so seriously?  Some might even say that I am missing the point, that what I see is merely a part of an intended satire.  That Fred and Darren are purposefully overplayed, over-the-top characters that can help us to learn a lesson about why we should respect humans for who they are.  I don’t buy it.  This may very well be their intent; however in my world, they aren’t over-the-top.  I have known a number of people like them.  They exist in pretty much the same form in the real world.  Well, perhaps without a wife that can wiggle her nose for dinner or a car that stops with your heel.  And if they exist and as merely existing like this proves their stupidity by definition, all that seeing their onscreen counterparts will do is justify their own existence.  Or worse yet, show their loved ones that this is normal, acceptable behavior.

    I guess there is some answer within myself, as deep-rooted as the core of my inner being, part of my total psyche.  Perhaps it has some foundation in the relationship that I have with my parents.  But you see, it really doesn’t matter, there is just no value in a show that can not overcome the feelings it instills in me.  There is no way to get around my need for basic civil treatment of real human beings.  So, in a way my solution is the easiest and probably the only one. 

    I avoid these two great shows of my childhood and replace them.  Replace them with shows that can fill the void, like I Dream of Jeannie and The Simpsons.  Shows where the sexist, condescending attitudes are either based upon naiveté or the eternal need for direction of the character (what will Jeannie do next?).    Shows where the male lead, when he treats someone poorly, is obviously a big, dumb, lummox who not only couldn’t know better if he tried but is also a definitive caricature of the way everyone knows not to be.   In short, shows that don’t demean and am free to enjoy.

    In the end my anger is stayed, not by reason, not by explanation, but by my handy remote control.

First published on BoobToob.net in Nov of 2001 (now dead)

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