Lest Ye Be Judged
WATTENBERG, DANIEL
Lest Ye Be Judged Is the Creator of Beavis and Butt-head' and the New Hit 'King of the Hill' a Social Conservative? By Daniel Wattenberg We all know what Clinton-ism is: the unacknowledged...
...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 1-900-LICK...
...Boys play baseball, not soccer...
...After struggling with the ad copy ("Uh, words"), Butt-head concludes: "Naked people...
...Remember the public culture of that now-receding time...
...The creator of MTV's Beavis and Butt-head is no conservative...
...Take Mike Judge...
...King of the Hill, which airs on Fox following The Simpsons Sunday night, is pixel-perfect conservative satire...
...Van Driessen, their pandering PC pushover of a teacher...
...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...
...The Hill family—dad Hank, mom Peg, and son Bobby—live in fictional Arlen, Texas, a plain-vanilla, middle-class suburb...
...Men who work hard and play by the rules swill cold ones, pat their spare tires, and tinker under the hoods of their pickups...
...As a result, they are lazy, stupid, coarse, authority-averse, thrill-seeking nihilists...
...And, yes, that was juvenile of me...
...These days, the conservative sensibility is more likely to be raided, or sampled, by ideologically coy or closeted crypto-cons—by cultural Clintonists...
...By Daniel Wattenberg We all know what Clinton-ism is: the unacknowledged appropriation and successful electoral exploitation of our ideas...
...The Hills are the kind of middle-American 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...
...He's even tougher on Hank's pal Dale, unerringly mocking his talk-radio-derived one-world delusions ("Open your eyes, man, they're trying to control global warming...
...Folks relax out back on concrete slab patios, not decks...
...Bobby learns he can leverage the intervention threat into a license to make juvenile mischief without having to fear the wrath of his now-neutralized father...
...Father Hank is the primary breadwinner, selling "propane and propane accessories...
...And, yes, that includes Beavis and Butt-head, the Daniel Wattenberg last wrote for The Weekly Standard about John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil...
...By now, even the arrested adolescent in the White House has figured out that it can't hurt to dress school kids in uniforms...
...Another aspect of Beavis and Butt-head mirrors the social-conservative party line...
...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 age-appropriate never seems to arise...
...in fact, fearing initiation, he declined to be interviewed for this article...
...And at Highland High, adult authority figures are outnumbered by easily gulled and ever-tolerant progressives like Mr...
...Hank disciplines...
...With its welter of newly minted taboos, its systematically euphemized language, its workplace surveillance and absurdly over-protective regulatory regime...
...At times, Judge comes close to romanticizing his favored characters...
...In a third, the boys are watching a "reality-based" news show called Hard Story...
...The question was suggested by a couple of commercials during a recent episode promoting upcoming Fox reality-based shows...
...But those were the Mitchell-Gephardt years, the high-water mark of the PC era...
...But Beavis and Butt-head were more than a medium through which to smirk at Peter Gabriel videos...
...Aren't there any couch potatoes in Arlen...
...It's getting so you can't even turn on the television anymore without being exposed to ideological larceny...
...After all, about the only adult in the series who ever succeeds in making Beavis and Butt-head behave is Highland High's Mr...
...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...
...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...
...Characters like Hank's marble-mouthed buddy Boomhauer say things like, "I tell you what, man," before they tell you what...
...The series could be summarized as an affectionate look at the daily ups and downs of Phil Gramm voters...
...Hank stokes his son's aggressive and competitive fires...
...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...
...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...
...Unlike the precociously worldly-wise sitcom wisenheimers of Roseanne or Married with Children, he is an innocent, a dependent who remains emotionally dependent...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...He is even a little scared of his dad, a grouch like his working-class precursors Ralph Kramden and Fred Flintstone...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Everyone anglicizes Spanish words...
...And the premise of Beavis and Butt-head...
...Every time you have a feeling, just stick it into a little pit inside your stomach and never let it out...
...Peg comforts...
...They may be idiots, but sometimes they're right...
...Well, now it's spreading...
...Hank plays south-of-the-border crying songs on his guitar, like his idol, Willie Nelson...
...After being thrown out of four different classes for inappropriately laughing (at the attendance roster's "Mr...
...They spend all their time together, mostly watching television, especially MTV...
...Your hostility invalidates our parent-child contract...
...two midget imbeciles who set off a conservative pop-culture scare three or four years back...
...It's not that Hollywood hates Middle America...
...They pursue suspiciously wholesome, suspiciously vernacular pastimes...
...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...
...Or they'll see an explosion in the background and say, 'Fire, cool,' which sort of shoots down the whole thing...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...See what Boutros Boutros Ghali Ghali thinks about that...
...For once, the boys stop laughing at the hidden sexual and scatological double entendres audible only to themselves...
...Peg emphasizes participation...
...We'll grow oranges in Alaska...
...It treated adults like juveniles...
...Traditionalists complain that the adult world—whether profit-hungry executives at Time-Warner or education-establishment ideologues who assume that children are born, not made, moral—no longer treats kids like kids...
...Hank and Peg have sex-specific hair and sex-specific roles in the family...
...Bobby loves his father and craves his approval...
...Homer Simpson is ultimately a loser...
...I say let the world warm up...
...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...
...And tubby pre-teen Bobby is an achingly childlike child...
...One surprise of saturation viewing is that most of their stupid antics are immediately inspired by contact with junk culture...
...The days of conservative exclusion from the culture are over...
...It's asking for Beavis and Butt-head...
...It's more like Hollywood patronizes Middle America...
...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...
...The people who make arty, high-concept 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...
...But is Judge tough enough...
...The Hills wage their own battles with antagonistic elites...
...But Judge is a satirist, not a propagandist, and his beloved Bubbas absorb some playful arm punches at their own pretensions...
...breezes in to prick Hank's mechanical machismo: "You had a clogged fuel line, but I blew it clear...
...Really...
...But for once, a little fear of an authoritarian father is not equated with dysfunction...
...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...
...Who watches these things...
...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...
...They line-dance and work on their cars...
...That's what I like about them...
...110 percent for that winning edge...
...Their adolescent minds are as plastic and suggestible as the crudest, most mechanistic critics of pop culture claim real adolescent minds are...
...Butkus" or the invocation of the "Gay Nineties" in history class), the two are finally sent to detention with Buzzcut, whose idea of respectful adult-child 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...
...Buzzcut, a traditional (albeit comically exaggerated) authoritarian apparently on loan to the school from the Marine Corps...
...Dad, that's not respectful adult-child growth dialogue," he tsks...
...But times have changed...
...I tell you what, man—the Hill family is traditional...
...That public culture didn't just treat juveniles like adults...
...Glo-BULL...
...Even when it's rooting for working-class families like the Simpsons or the Conners, it can't help pitying them...
...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...
...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...
...But that's exactly what Mike Judge did on 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 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...
...Get it...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...But first, the Hills...
...But if he's going to steal our ideology, then he's asking for it—a conservative reappraisal...
...The other was The World's Scariest Police Shootouts...
...One was for When Stunts Go Bad...
...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...
...If they have the money to pay (usually they don't), they qualify...
...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...
...But you would never know it from King of the Hill, Judge's second animated sitcom...
...Wouldn't Hank, Boomhauer, and Dale be exactly the beer-guts-'n'-vicarious-glory demographic that eats this schlock up...
...We're there, dude...
...I wish I could, ma'am, but I can't take custody without an interview," answers the case worker, an alternately sniveling and bullying jar-gon-spouter from nudnik hell...
...Mike Judge is not looking to join the club...
...The aerial pan of the opening credits swoops over platform pools on postage-stamp lots...
...Before long, Hank has been reported to Child Protective Services for child abuse...
...And the boys are not just ultimately coarsened by junk culture in a way that's hard to measure...
...Into the culture at large...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 37
