The biggest news in the world of television is ABC's plan to introduce this fall the sitcom Cavemen, based on the characters from GEICO's "So easy a caveman can do it" ad campaign. The announcement is creating controversy for two reasons. Some feel basing a television show on an advertisement is somehow a new low even for Hollywood, but what will keep the pot stirred far longer is the show's underlying messages--who exactly do these cavemen represent, and what is the show saying about them?

The blog Angry Black Woman believes the cavemen are actually African-Americans. Given that this column is called Happily Hippie, you can guess who I think the cavemen most likely are; after all, aside from distorted Neanderthal-like facial features, the cavemen do look surprisingly like twenty-something male hippies. They have long hair parted in the middle, beards and the casual "slacker" dress. And while Angry Black Woman claims they have darker-than-white skin, she's wrong: In a publicity photo (left); everyone in it, cavemen and others, look the same shade of "white." So, like the majority of today’s counterculture, the cavemen are Caucasian. Now, different viewers are likely going to see different things, but I'd guess most will make the hippie-caveman connection: it's just too obvious.

So, hippies as subhuman--where have we heard that before? As one who researches such matters, I know: for forty years, the media has been filled with it. A few examples:

Many Americans have had their attitudes towards hippies shaped by the late-sixties comic strips of L'il Abner. If Al Capp's hippie women were usually voluptuous; his hippie males looked Neanderthal --teeth sticking out, piggish noses, flies buzzing about; their protest group is called SWINE.

The jungle, of course, is often a symbol of the primitive; as Governor of California Ronald Reagan joked, "A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah."

Okay, you can stop chortling now. Here's sportswriter Mike Lopresti, of USA Today discussing the World Series-winning 2004 Boston Red Sox, a team widely seen as countercultural --"beards and braids and bohemians," he says of them. Lopresti writes of Johnny Damon's "caveman look" --a depressingly common description of Damon--and comments that team members are "possibly the shaggiest animals to walk into Busch Stadium since the last time the Clydesdales marched . . . " Yes, a woman with long hair is a woman with long hair, but a man with long hair is primitive and subhuman.

So America has a history of de-humanizing hippies; this seems part of a larger trend towards Social-Darwinism, the notion that some groups aren't as "evolved" as others and that this explains their alleged inferiority. Ironically, many Social-Darwinists say they don't believe in evolution, but for generations, Social-Darwinism has been a pseudo-scientific way for bigots to justify their prejudices, and it's been applied to any number of American ethnic groups. Small wonder, then, that confronted with the phenomenon of hippies--a highly distinctive cultural group hated by the powerful--bigots should inflict their Social-Darwinism on the counterculture. It's the same old dog doing the same old trick only with a new toy.

All that said, I'm optimistic about Cavemen. Yes, the show could be crude bigotry--"Let's laugh at the contemptible inferiors." More likely, it will attempt to poke fun at and show the foolishness of Social-Darwinism, racism and ethnic chauvinism. Here's why:

Although the characters in those GEICO commercials are physically pre-human, they're not dumb. Just the opposite: they're articulate, droll, sometimes witty. And when LA Times columnist Joel Stein interviewed some of the show's actors, he was impressed that they "kept talking about how much they loved how the cavemen were exasperated by discrimination." Both are good signs.

And even as a hippie concerned about media stereotyping, I think the GEICO ads are clever and funny. Stein, who apparently has seen a Caveman script, comments, "I enjoyed the caveman obsessed with the offensiveness of The Flintstones. He chats up a woman at a wedding with: 'So this tiny waitress can carry a rack of ribs that's so heavy, it can tip over a car made of stone? I'm sorry, I just don't see what's funny about that.'"

With its focus on the important issue of prejudice, Cavemen has the potential to stand out in a season likely packed with short-lived mediocrities. Let's hope its writers recognize that potential and instead of producing something offensive and embarrassing, create something that will humanize and heal.