hank hill is everyman.

i don't think i've ever come to the defense of a cartoon character. today i feel compelled to defend hank hill, mostly because of a conversation me and bone had yesterday. bone said that hank was a sack of crap and said that his son bobby was well-adjusted despite hank's oppressive regime of self-denial and propane fetishism. personally, i don't necessarily think that hank's a healthy or necessarily even a good guy, my response to bone when he went off on hank was that hank is indeed everyman. but you know how i am, ask me where i stand on something and generally my response is "anyplace you're not."

in any case, hank's not perfect, that's for sure, he's uptight, stubborn, old-fashioned, narrow-minded, rage-prone and in some ways blissfuly and maddeningly ignorant. he's also got an insecure streak a mile wide, i think i would too, though, if cotton was my dad, but that's neither here nor there. the fears he has of his shortcomings and inadequacies seem to lead him to force himself to conform to this very narrow and specifically defined ideal of masculinity. those features of his personality, however, are the ones that are most easily noticed, mostly because he's a tv dad. think of homer simpson's blatant idiocy or al bundy's savage oafishness.

everybody's got issues, hank's no different and i think that simply because the issues he deals with make him a more subjectively unpalatable character to some is no reason to say that he's a sack of crap. however, it would be all to easy too say that hank is a good guy simply because there are people worse than him or that he's not really worse than anybody else. no, hank hill is a man of exemplary character.

hank, despite all his shortcomings, self-perceived and otherwise, is a person characterized by loyalty, humility, authenticity, and integrity. he showed his loyalty and humility the time that bill developed dissociative disorder and thought he was his ex-wife by putting on a dress in front of the entire strickland propane christmas party at significant risk to his own reputation and telling bill that she was never coming back. he further shows his humility when his truck dies and he cries over it, exposing himself to ridicule from the superfically more likeable yet nearly completely morally bankrupt dale gribble. he's authentic in that he knows who he is and won't pretend to be someone he's not, like that time that the guy from boston, i think his name was holloway, and totally wanted hank to be JR (jaay aaaaahh in his own words) from dallas, in the interest of disclosure, hank did go along with it for a bit, but wised up and told holloway that he could do business with competitor m.f. thatherton. authenticity, however, goes only so far without integrity, which hank has in spades. the time that the quarry was set to be drained and hank, dale, and bill figure out that boomhauer will find out that they're responsible for the loss of his beloved mustang, sally, dale and bill try and pin the blame entirely on hank. boomhauer, aware of the quality of hank's character, sniffs them out right away and on the way home assures bobby that his father is indeed a good man.

sombody call brookhaven, i'm an addict.

feeling: slightly overwhelmed
thinking of: furniture
music: "teddy bear" red sovine