LEST YE BE JUDGED

Take Mike Judge. The creator of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head is no conservative. But you would never know it from King of the Hill, Judge’s second animated sitcom. King of the Hill, which airs on Fox following The Simpsons Sunday night, is pixel-perfect conservative satire. Really. The series could be summarized as an affectionate look at the daily ups and downs of Phil Gramm voters. On second thought, the series is more entertaining than that, but the point is, how on earth did something this right-wing ever get on prime time, episodic, network television?

Mike Judge is not looking to join the club; in fact, fearing initiation, he declined to be interviewed for this article. But if he’s going to steal our ideology, then he’s asking for it — a conservative reappraisal. And, yes, that includes Beavis and Butt-head, the two midget imbeciles who set off a conservative pop-culture scare three or four years back. But first, the Hills.

The Hill family — dad Hank, mom Peg, and son Bobby — live in fictional Arlen, Texas, a plain-vanilla, middleclass suburb. The aerial pan of the opening credits swoops over platform pools on postage-stamp lots. Folks relax out back on concrete slab patios, not decks. Boys play baseball, not soccer. Men who work hard and play by the rules swill cold ones, pat their spare tires, and tinker under the hoods of their pickups. Everyone anglicizes Spanish words. Characters like Hank’s marble-mouthed buddy Boomhauer say things like, “I tell you what, man,” before they tell you what.

I tell you what, man — the Hill family is traditional. Father Hank is the primary breadwinner, selling “propane and propane accessories.” Wife Peg helps out, in a traditionally feminine occupation, as a substitute teacher (her specialty is Spanish, which she too manglicizes, in a running joke). And tubby pre-teen Bobby is an achingly childlike child. Unlike the precociously worldly-wise sitcom wisenheimers of Roseanne or Married with Children, he is an innocent, a dependent who remains emotionally dependent.

Bobby loves his father and craves his approval. He is even a little scared of his dad, a grouch like his workingclass precursors Ralph Kramden and Fred Flintstone. Anger is the one feeling Hank Hill believes in sharing: “Instead of letting it out, try holding it in,” he advises his crying, broken-hearted niece in one episode. “Every time you have a feeling, just stick it into a little pit inside your stomach and never let it out.”

But for once, a little fear of an authoritarian father is not equated with dysfunction. Bobby exhibits the filial reverence that disappeared from sitcom families in that September long ago when Mike Brady showed up at his drafting table with a divine new perm.

Hank and Peg have sex-specific hair and sex-specific roles in the family. Hank disciplines. Peg comforts. Hank stokes his son’s aggressive and competitive fires. Peg emphasizes participation. When Peg tells Bobby on the way to a Little League game, “Don’t you worry, son, you just do your best,” Hank demands “better than your best . . . 110 percent for that winning edge.”

The Hills are the kind of middleAmerican family that Hollywood has made sport of for a generation — from the Bunkers in the ’70s through the Bundys in the ’90s — for their reactionary politics and lowbrow tastes. It’s not that Hollywood hates Middle America. It’s more like Hollywood patronizes Middle America. Even when it’s rooting for working-class families like the Simpsons or the Conners, it can’t help pitying them. Homer Simpson is ultimately a loser. And when Roseanne wasn’t combating the outmoded prejudices of her own class, she and Dan were stoically coping with wage stagnation, downsizing, and the export of skilled jobs to low-wage states — helpless victims of off-screen corporate elites, a shadowy overclass straight out of Dick Gephardt’s imagination.

The Hills wage their own battles with antagonistic elites. But Judge pays them the respect of allowing them to fight the very elites that opinion polls and election results show people from this class and region consider antagonistic: pointy-headed bureaucrats and family-intervention do-gooders who defend children from parents. Together with the realism of the show’s politics, the detailed realism of the drawing and coloring of characters and settings provides the viewer the recognition in the midst of exaggeration indispensable to good satire.

When Bobby gets a black eye in his Little League game and Hank is spied blowing his stack at a clueless clerk at the Mega Lo Mart, smalltown gossips jump to conclusions. Before long, Hank has been reported to Child Protective Services for child abuse. “I wish I could, ma’am, but I can’t take custody without an interview,” answers the case worker, an alternately sniveling and bullying jargon-spouter from nudnik hell. “Don’t you worry, he’s in the system now,” he assures the caller just before peeling off the support sleeves he wears on his repetitive-stress-injured wrists, with a crackle of Velcro and a feeble yelp.

As the “twig boy bureaucrat” (Hank’s term) snoops for evidence that will confirm his preconceptions and justify moving Bobby from his home in “redneck city” to a foster family in North Arlen where he can “develop healthy life adaptations,” Judge and co-creator Greg Daniels maliciously parody his simpering developmental-psych sprachen (“You’re coming from an anger mindset,” “Loud is not allowed”) and class prejudice. Bobby learns he can leverage the intervention threat into a license to make juvenile mischief without having to fear the wrath of his nowneutralized father. “Dad, that’s not respectful adult-child growth dialogue,” he asks. “Your hostility invalidates our parent-child contract.” The plot could almost be a “Focus on the Family” scare video on how the therapeutic culture undermines adult authority in the home and elevates children to the status of peers.

But Judge is a satirist, not a propagandist, and his beloved Bubbas absorb some playful arm punches at their own pretensions. In the same episode, Hank and his gear-head pals comically misdiagnose what’s wrong with his pickup, until finally ditzy niece Luanne, a beauty-school student with a body that says Bam! breezes in to prick Hank’s mechanical machismo: “You had a clogged fuel line, but I blew it clear.”

He’s even tougher on Hank’s pal Dale, unerringly mocking his talkradio- derived one-world delusions (“Open your eyes, man, they’re trying to control global warming. Get it? Glo-BULL. . . . I say let the world warm up. See what Boutros Boutros Ghali Ghali thinks about that. We’ll grow oranges in Alaska”). But is Judge tough enough?

At times, Judge comes close to romanticizing his favored characters. They pursue suspiciously wholesome, suspiciously vernacular pastimes. They line-dance and work on their cars. Hank plays south-of-the-border crying songs on his guitar, like his idol, Willie Nelson. Aren’t there any couch potatoes in Arlen? The question was suggested by a couple of commercials during a recent episode promoting upcoming Fox reality-based shows. One was for When Stunts Go Bad. The other was The World’s Scariest Police Shootouts. Who watches these things? Wouldn’t Hank, Boomhauer, and Dale be exactly the beer-guts-‘n’-vicarious-glory demographic that eats this schlock up?

Of course, tweaking the programming of one’s host network and poking fun at the viewing habits of the audience that sustains one are not comic strategies for the faint of heart. But that’s exactly what Mike Judge did on Beavis and Butt-head.

Judge’s notorious satire mischievously subverted the signature music videos of MTV, the network social traditionalists love to hate, by having us view them through the eyes of Beavis and Butt-head. By design, about the only time these two idiots were savants was when they were laughing at these videos’ icky pretensions to aesthetic or social merit.

“The people who make arty, highconcept videos think they are so heavy and smart, but Beavis and Butt-head watch them and say, ‘This is dumb, it sucks,'” Judge once said. “Or they’ll see an explosion in the background and say, ‘Fire, cool,’ which sort of shoots down the whole thing. That’s what I like about them. They may be idiots, but sometimes they’re right.”

But Beavis and Butt-head were more than a medium through which to smirk at Peter Gabriel videos. They were a medium through which to smirk at American cultural meltdown — and in terms not so unlike those employed by the Wildmons and Rakoltas who anathematized the show as the midnight stroke on their cultural doomsday clock.

The social-traditionalist critique of today’s popular culture goes something like this: With the rise in two-earner couples, parental supervision of the next generation is declining. The void in parental authority is being filled by peer pressure and junk culture — violent video games and trash television, misogynistic rap, crypto-satanic heavy metal, and morosely self-absorbed alternative music — and the symbolic confluence of these insalubrious tributaries, MTV. Underexposed to adult authority and overexposed to peers and junk culture, children — especially boys, especially teenage boys — are apt to become lazy, stupid, coarse, authority- averse, thrill-seeking nihilists.

And the premise of Beavis and Butt-head? Two teenage boys are devoid of parental supervision (Watching a family dinner scene on TV, a perplexed Butt- head once asked, “Why’s that guy eating dinner with those old people?”) They spend all their time together, mostly watching television, especially MTV. As a result, they are lazy, stupid, coarse, authority-averse, thrill-seeking nihilists.

And the boys are not just ultimately coarsened by junk culture in a way that’s hard to measure. One surprise of saturation viewing is that most of their stupid antics are immediately inspired by contact with junk culture. Their adolescent minds are as plastic and suggestible as the crudest, most mechanistic critics of pop culture claim real adolescent minds are.

In one episode, the boys are paging through skin mags at the convenience store, when they see an ad for for Sunny Grove Nudist Colony. After struggling with the ad copy (“Uh, words“), Butt-head concludes: “Naked people. We’re there, dude.” In another, they call a phone sex line (and get a slovenly sow in a dark and smoky trailer home) after watching a commercial in which a siren in a satin teddy invites them to call 1900-LICK. In a third, the boys are watching a “reality-based” news show called Hard Story. A report on breast implants prompts the boys to seek surgical enlargements of their own (and they never figure out that all they got were nose jobs).

Another aspect of Beavis and Butthead mirrors the social-conservative party line. Traditionalists complain that the adult world — whether profithungry executives at Time-Warner or education-establishment ideologues who assume that children are born, not made, moral — no longer treats kids like kids.

By design or not, the adults in Beavis and Butt-head insist for the most part on treating the two early adolescents like fellow adults. When the two venture into the commercial realm — to sign up with a dating service, set up their own phone sex line, join a nudist colony, or have their willies enlarged — the question of whether these activities are ageappropriate never seems to arise. If they have the money to pay (usually they don’t), they qualify. And at Highland High, adult authority figures are outnumbered by easily gulled and ever-tolerant progressives like Mr. Van Driessen, their pandering PC pushover of a teacher.

My guess is that there is conscious design here, that Judge is laughing at the adult world’s reluctance these days to do the dirty work of adulthood, the making and enforcing of rules for minors. After all, about the only adult in the series who ever succeeds in making Beavis and Butthead behave is Highland High’s Mr. Buzzcut, a traditional (albeit comically exaggerated) authoritarian apparently on loan to the school from the Marine Corps. After being thrown out of four different classes for inappropriately laughing (at the attendance roster’s “Mr. Butkus” or the invocation of the “Gay Nineties” in history class), the two are finally sent to detention with Buzzcut, whose idea of respectful adultchild growth dialogue is to brandish a riot stick and scream, “There’s nothing wrong with you little monsters that can’t be cured by a quick return to the days of corporal punishment!” For once, the boys stop laughing at the hidden sexual and scatological double entendres audible only to themselves.

Now, it would be disingenuous to suggest that Beavis and Butt-head’s appeal lies solely in its shrewd adult satire of contemporary cultural meltdown. In the early years of the show, I watched for a time and laughed — not just at Judge’s shrewd adult satire, but at the tasteless, juvenile clowning of the boys also. And, yes, that was juvenile of me. But those were the Mitchell-Gephardt years, the high-water mark of the PC era. Remember the public culture of that now-receding time? With its welter of newly minted taboos, its systematically euphemized language, its workplace surveillance and absurdly overprotective regulatory regime? That public culture didn’t just treat juveniles like adults. It treated adults like juveniles. And an official culture that treats its grown-ups like children is asking for an alternative culture that snaps its bra straps and allows its infantilized adults the occasional juvenile catharsis. It’s asking for Beavis and Butt- head.

But times have changed. By now, even the arrested adolescent in the White House has figured out that it can’t hurt to dress school kids in uniforms. And Mike Judge has fashioned King of the Hill, the only new TV hit of 1997, into a show that can run without complaints from anybody at 8:30 p.m. — smack-dab in the middle of Family Hour.

Daniel Wattenberg last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.