King of the Hill

0:00:03.7 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke, I’m Landry Ayres. And as hard as it may be, I promise to our audience, I will not do any of my very, very poor impressions on the show today, even though it would be also fun, because today we are taking a trip down to Arlen, Texas to talk Mike Judge’s classic animated series, King of the Hill, joining me today to discuss the benefits of propane and propane accessories are co-​founder of Feminists for Liberty. Kat Murti.

0:00:34.8 Kat Murti: Thanks for having me and a.

0:00:36.4 Landry Ayres: And a first time guest on the show, we are so happy to have editor at large at Reason Nick Gillespie. Nick, thank you so much for joining us.

0:00:43.0 Nick Gillespie: Pleased as punch to be here.

0:00:48.0 Landry Ayres: An interesting sort of thought experiment that I like to propose when whenever King of the Hill comes up with people I haven’t talked about it with before, is the question of what would Hank Hill have done during the 2016 election? It exposes a lot of the assumptions we have about the kind of character he is and the place that this show is set in, and a lot of the other characters sort of intersect with the imagined story lines that we dream up when we think about the moral quandary that Hank Hill would have to go through in order to decide who to vote for in that particular election, so I pose that question to you two as well, as we get started, what would Hank have done as the 2016 election was happening, you’ve got Hillary and you’ve got Donald Trump. And what would happen in the 2020 election? You think after the four years of Trump having been president?

0:01:52.4 Nick Gillespie: Landry, if I may, and I really hope to hell that you were named after Tom Landry, who is also the namesake of the middle school in Arlen, Texas.

0:02:00.1 Landry Ayres: I was due on Super Bowl Sunday.

0:02:02.6 Nick Gillespie: Alright, and Tom Landry, by the way, is one of the great loser Super Ball coaches. He did get one, but it’s like he’s like a hair’s breath away from being Marv Levy. A real high performance loser.

0:02:15.1 Landry Ayres: But I think my parents must have just been fans of men who wear fedoras all the time, or something like that.

0:02:21.5 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, especially at a football field.

0:02:23.7 Landry Ayres: Yes, of course.

0:02:23.8 Kat Murti: But it screams libertarianism, Landry.

0:02:25.0 Landry Ayres: That’s what it is, yeah.

0:02:28.8 Nick Gillespie: Well, first of it, and you’ve of course, alighted the fact that there was a fascinating alternative candidate in 2016 named Gary Johnson, a Western’s… Two-​term western state governor that I think Hank would have toyed with voting for, but then would have been like, “Oh, you know, he’s a little too high all the time.” My sense of this… And we can get into the reasons why, I think that Hank Hill would have voted for Trump in 2016 because he wanted something different. And I think that the real reveal is I think that he would have voted for Obama in the spirit of hope and change in 2012, and he would have been disappointed by Obama and hence goes with Trump, and then he would have been disappointed with Trump. And I don’t know that he would have voted for Biden. I think he might have voted for Jo Jorgensen because she seems a kind of motherly Peggy Hill-​esque character, and I mean that in all of the ambivalent ways that you could take that.

0:03:30.5 Landry Ayres: Can you walk me through that line of thinking really quick, like what was it that you think would have made Hank an Obama voter, and how do we go from that point on? ‘Cause to me, that’s a big sort of inflection point for the type of choices you think he might make.

0:03:49.6 Nick Gillespie: Well, I think you gotta bring it back to King of the Hill is ultimately a Texas exceptionalism show. It does not take place in the United States as much as it takes place in Texas, and this as I say you guys have much deeper histories with Texas than I do having been raised there. I lived in Huntsville, Texas, the center of the… Where the death chamber is the center of the Texas Department of Corrections, and that locates… That’s one of… A great identity source for Texas that it has this overly determined and powerful correction system, put… Texas has put more people to death in any given year than like all of the other states put together for like 10 years, and I think…

0:04:38.2 Nick Gillespie: So what I’m getting at is, Hank would have been fed up with George W. Bush, he would have obviously hated George H. W. Bush as a fake Texan, he would have been okay with W, and then he would have been like, You are terrible, and you are centralizing everything in Washington, ’cause I think in a lot of ways, what King of the Hill is ultimately about is not a broad decentralization, but a skepticism of centralized power, whether it’s corporate power, whether it’s political power, Mega Lo Mart is a problem, it’s both necessary and good for the community, but it’s also a problem. I think Hank would have gone through Seven Stages of Grief with George W. Bush and having to come reckon with the fact that between LBJ, HW Bush and W. Bush, Texas has an unblemished record of shitty presidents. And he would’ve…

0:05:25.8 Kat Murti: Well he clearly like LBJ enough to name his dog Lady Bird.

0:05:29.9 Nick Gillespie: Right. Well, no, but Lady Bird, Not LBJ, ’cause Lady Bird is ineffectual. And I think he would have been an Obama supporter because he would have grudgingly wanted something new and different, and he would have been repulsed by the Republican party and how it acted under W. Bush, which was to agglomerate power, to centralize it and to make the government bigger and bigger really, and I think he would have been fed up with that and he would of… He would not have voted for Hillary Clinton. She is kind of the incarnation of many of the things that he seems to rail against, which is a feminized culture, somebody who is constantly telling other people what to do and locating meaning in DC or outside of local communities. So I think he would have gone with Trump and then he would have been like, “Oh, what a jackass.” ‘Cause Trump is too crude and a blowhard, Trump didn’t deliver enough on the things that he said he was gonna do, so I think Hill would’ve… Where he lands in 2020. That’s a good question.

0:06:36.8 Kat Murti: I actually think something very different from Nick here, I think that the default assumption, you look at Hank Hill, he’s a middle-​aged guy, small town, Texas, fairly personally conservative, you would see him and be like, “Okay, well, he’s clearly a Republican, he’s gonna vote for Trump.” And I actually don’t think that he would be. I think that he is a Never-​Trumper and it’s Hank Hill hates vulgarity and Hank Hill, you kinda see his character developed throughout the series, he really cares about what he sees as bad behavior towards women, whether it’s his wife Peggy, whether it’s like a…

0:07:12.9 Nick Gillespie: Or Luanne.

0:07:15.8 Kat Murti: Luanne. Luanne.

0:07:15.9 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, he’s very protective.

0:07:16.8 Kat Murti: He’s very protective of Luanne. He’s very protective. At some point, he steps up for his colleague who he finds out is a sex worker and steps up against her pimp, he dislikes, he has a troubled relationship with his dad for a number of reasons, but in part because he doesn’t like the way that he treats his step-​mom slash Hank’s kindergarten classmate. He’s just… He wouldn’t have liked Trump. He would have liked… I would have wanted to vote Republican, I think, but he would have not liked Trump both because he’s a New Yorker, but also because he’s vulgar and he didn’t like the way that he talked to and he didn’t like the way he treated women. So I think he’s a Never-​Trumper. I think Dale Gribble is full on MAGA hat, talking about Hillary’s emails, has all the conspiracy theories, and then I kind of see Bill Dauterive struggling between the two… Yeah. ’cause he wants to wear the hat. He wants to be cool like Dale, but he also, he looks up to Hank Hill, he wants to be Hank, Hank is his hero. Right, so I think he’s kind of pulled between the two. Boomhauer, I’m seeing as either just not voting at all, or he’s gonna… I could see him going Trump, I could see him even voting Hillary or maybe he’s the old teacher.

0:08:33.7 Nick Gillespie: I think Boomhauer is a total [0:08:35.5] ____ Gar-​Jo.

0:08:37.5 Kat Murti: Johnson?

0:08:37.6 Nick Gillespie: Gary Johnson.

0:08:38.1 Kat Murti: Yeah, I can see it. I can see it.

0:08:38.4 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, because he’s actually minimal government and he’s lifestyle liberation, and you can hear him say like, bake the damn cake. Right.

0:08:48.1 Kat Murti: Yo like that shit. That would’ve been good.

0:08:51.6 Nick Gillespie: He would’ve been there.

0:08:53.2 Kat Murti: Yeah, I could see Boomhauer in his little tiger stripe Speedo is voting for Gary Johnson.

0:08:56.5 Nick Gillespie: That’s how I picture it.

0:08:58.3 Kat Murti: Peggy Hill is gonna be Hillary Clinton hard. Peggy Hill is Hillary Clinton’s base. She’s a Texas woman, she’s a Montana woman. She wouldn’t have liked certain parts of Hillary Clinton, but she is the woman who wants to back Hillary Clinton because she’s a female candidate, not for any other reason.

0:09:17.4 Nick Gillespie: She’s a vagina-​centric voter. Right? Yeah.

0:09:19.2 Kat Murti: Right. She, she is, that brings me back to the episode where she’s studying, where she has to be the sex ed substitute teacher, that is her struggle in this whole episode, you’re gonna see Nancy, Nancy Gribble, Dale’s wife. I think she’s voting Trump, and she’s going to shame… She’s gonna be shaming Peggy because Peggy wants to support Hillary Clinton and Luanne’s over there voting for the Green Party or whatever minority communist candidate she can write in.

0:09:52.6 Nick Gillespie: Who is John Redcorn voting for?

0:09:56.4 Kat Murti: John Redcorn, I could see him kind of coming out against both candidates.

0:10:01.6 Landry Ayres: A principled non-​voter.

0:10:02.3 Nick Gillespie: I could see him again. I want to see the cast go mostly for Gary Johnson in 2016, but I realize that the rating…

0:10:09.9 Kat Murti: I could see him maybe going Gary Johnson, but I don’t know if he’s going to. I have certainty in 2020, Hank Hill might look back and then vote for Trump, because he doesn’t like… He doesn’t like a lot of the vulgarity and those kinds of things, but he’s gonna say, “Well, he was good for the economy. He was good for propane.” Hank is a propane voter.

0:10:32.8 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, that’s true. See, yeah, that’s why I think he would have been so disappointed, like I think that Hank is in that middle where it’s like he wants… He has hope in change, and he’s constantly disappointed, so he would be lurching towards whoever offered the alternative of what just happened, and then that’s where I think in 2020, it’s just too much where you have the major parties have swapped in and out of the presidency and out of Congress, and they’ve just been terrible, and I think he would have pulled a switch for Jo Jorgensen then just as the first protest vote, ’cause Hank is, he’s very conventional, he’s individualistic and idiosyncratic, but he is very normal, and I think that’s where this limit would be.

0:11:21.3 Kat Murti: I think Hank and Luanne are the two candidates who are sort of the people that the Libertarian party wants to persuade and is constantly struggling to get across, right? Luanne because she wants change in a very different way, she’s kind of attracted to these radical ideas et cetera, but she’s a little wishy-​washy on what exactly she supports, she’s not super ideological, but you could get a libertarian vote out of Luanne and Hank Hill is much more of this like, I Just stay out of my business, leave me alone to my lawn and my beer and my buddies, and that’s what libertarians kind of want, and he’s gonna be pulled into the Republican party because he is personally a conservative. But he’s not a bigot. He doesn’t like Big Government.

0:12:11.4 Nick Gillespie: Not at all.

0:12:13.9 Kat Murti: And fundamentally, he doesn’t like the idea of radicalism, but I think he likes the idea of, “just leave me alone.”

0:12:19.6 Landry Ayres: Right. I think it’s interesting because 2020 really complicates it. When it was just the 2016 election, I feel like you could come to a more conclusive answer, but then when you get to 2020, the disappointment of Donald Trump.

0:12:34.7 Nick Gillespie: Sadly, you’re speaking for the entire country… Right. If history had ended in 2016, we could be like, Okay, you know, whatever.

0:12:40.5 Landry Ayres: Yeah, sadly. But there’s a lot of ways that this could go. I do think Hank might feel a… I wouldn’t call it duty, but the draw of voting for Trump, but would be turned off by the vulgarity, I think the sort of austere, reserved nature that he exhibits and the fact that…

0:13:03.2 Kat Murti: I don’t think he could do it. I think he’d struggle with it.

0:13:04.9 Landry Ayres: The fact that Trump is like a… He’s a Yankee, he’s a New Yorker, so you can’t support that by any means, but it would be like…

0:13:13.8 Nick Gillespie: But who’s he running against? He’s running against a fake New Yorker.

0:13:17.7 Landry Ayres: Well, here’s what I’ll say, here’s what I’ll say. It’s not Hillary Clinton that he votes for because… And that’s the real tension of the imagined story line I have in my head is he goes in and he’s like, I don’t like any of these candidates, he’s thought about Gary Johnson, but I could see it being like Boomhauer coming to him and being like, and saying something and trying to persuade him and Hank, having some pithy off-​handed comment about throwing away your vote and how we have a duty and it’s a waste, and so the real…

0:13:48.4 Kat Murti: American flag in the background.

0:13:50.2 Nick Gillespie: That he’s not a litter bug, so why would you throw away your vote, right?

0:13:55.2 Landry Ayres: Right. But he would be like, “Well, what am I gonna do then?” And it’s him deciding, and it would come down to… He could either write in Ronald Reagan like somebody did with the electoral vote, he would just be like, it’s symbolic for me, it’s about my character and my values, or if part of the tension is Peggy trying to convince him to do the right thing and she’s pushing him to do what she thinks is right and to vote for Hillary, it would get to the very end and you wouldn’t see who he votes for, but you see him check the box and he comes home and you could… Peggy’s like, “Well, what did you end up deciding? What did you do?” And he said, “Well, I voted for the only woman that I think is qualified for the job,” and she’s like, “Oh, I’m so proud of you, Hank.” And then he goes, “I voted for you Peggy.”

0:14:40.8 Nick Gillespie: Yeah.

0:14:40.9 Landry Ayres: And he would vote for Peggy Hill for president, and it would be the same as throwing it away, but it would be him reinforcing his sort of support for her and thinking.

0:14:51.1 Kat Murti: Support for his values, yeah.

0:14:54.3 Landry Ayres: Yes. So that’s what I see.

0:14:54.4 Kat Murti: Especially, I think that there’s gonna be another element there, right, I think it’s also Kahn, Kahn, his neighbor is gonna be a big Hillary Clinton fan and is going to be using that to annoy… I think he would think. I think he would be doing it to annoy…

0:15:07.1 Nick Gillespie: I think Kahn is total Trumpy though because he’s a troll and he wants to make money. I think he identifies with Trump, as you know, the gold-​plated entrepreneur.

0:15:18.3 Kat Murti: I could see that too. I could see that too. I don’t know, I could see it going either way ’cause I can also see a whole story arc where Hank is annoyed by Kahn who’s using Hillary Clinton just to irritate us.

0:15:31.0 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, beat up on the rednecks. Yeah, then give a basket of deplorable.

0:15:32.6 Kat Murti: Beat up on the rednecks. And then so Hank feels like he has to support Trump for that reason, but he doesn’t like him and he doesn’t wanna support him, and then maybe at the end of the day, Kahn votes for Trump.

0:15:44.3 Landry Ayres: Oh, I can definitely see Kahn voting for Trump.

0:15:47.1 Nick Gillespie: I would love to see that in the booth, like all of them have their public commitments, but then all of them would actually be voting for the other person in the secrecy of the ballot booth.

0:16:00.0 Landry Ayres: You see that that conflict going on, and there’d be the tense climax of the episode of zooming in on everyone’s eyes as they’re beginning to sort of decide what they really, really want, and the sort of breaking tension of them walking out and at the end of the day all being a part of the same community and resuming their lives with the same mundanity that they experience every single day, and it ends with them drinking beer in the alley behind the house, just saying… Yeah.

[music]

0:16:29.8 Nick Gillespie: One of the things that I find interesting, and I love King of the Hill, when it debuted in 1997. I was living in Huntsville, Texas, which is about 80 miles north of Houston. It’s a small town. It’s a prison town, a university town. My ex-​wife was teaching at San Houston State, and I had moved from LA, so I’m like the twig boy, the bureaucratic eunuch who shows up in the first episode and various other episodes to bedevil Hank with governmental overreach. But there’s something about the show that captures how government matters and Hank and the universe there is very invested in kind of public space and doing things as a community, but also there’s so much tension, but ultimately it is that Arlen is gonna have to take care of Arlen’s problems, and that even if you go to Austin, that’s already a distant capital that’s kind of…

0:17:30.4 Kat Murti: Austin is Big Government, which is how Texans actually feel. You know what I mean?

0:17:33.0 Nick Gillespie: Right. But even as… And this for me was one of the… I said I was moving there from LA, I had started at Reason in ’93, moved to Texas in ’97, and it’s like, Okay, great, I am going to go to a state of rugged individualists where everybody is kind of a small government person, and I was like, Holy… Like Texas, it’s two forms of Big Government, and it was George Bush was governor at the time, but it’s like there’s a Republican conservative, big government thing that just wants to plow huge piles of ground into big things, and then there’s a Democratic version of it, and I was so kind of disappointed, but I feel like Hank kind of embodies that Texan tension between being an individualist, being self-​reliant, but also being really invested in communal identity and to a certain degree, big government, but not one that is then dictating every little procedure that you do in your office, so it’s a conflict that I think is broadly representative of where most Americans are.

0:18:35.0 Landry Ayres: Texas, especially because it’s geographically situated really at the nexus of the West and the South, I find you have this like old South traditional legacy going on there, it’s just on the cusp, but it also because of its independent sort of Lone Star identity of being the only recognized place, and it’s on the cusp of the West, yes.

0:18:57.6 Nick Gillespie: And it’s also a border state, it’s… But I wanna end… Just to hopefully get under your guys’ skin, but certainly any listeners who are from Texas, it’s really important to know that Texas fought for independence in order to maintain slavery. And it comes up in an episode, and that’s the conundrum, and in a weird way, Texas, by most demographic accounts is gonna overtake California sometime around 2050 as the most populous state, that’s when it will become the kind of central cultural myth-​making entity of the US in the way that New York State had been until California replaced… And then California will be replaced by Texas, not Florida.

0:19:38.0 Nick Gillespie: Because it’s bigger, but that tension which runs through so much of American cultural myth making and identity… National identity is so marbled throughout Texas. It’s going to be exciting and it’ll have a new accent, but we’re gonna be dealing with a lot of the same problems, and I think part of that is the South was the ultimate big government state, the Confederacy was an incredibly repressive authoritarian regime for whites and it was obviously for blacks.

0:20:08.8 Kat Murti: Right, and it’s ultimately against human liberty.

0:20:11.6 Nick Gillespie: Yeah and so like this is gonna be… And I think this is one of the reasons I love King of the Hill, and it just… It doesn’t resolve these things, it just kind of… It’s like scenario planning. Every episode was about, okay, here are all these things going on in the culture that are at odds with each other, and how… If you are a good faith person and a good faith citizen, and this takes place in a wonderfully kind, ultimately loving universe, but it’s like, how do you deal with it?

0:20:39.6 Kat Murti: What the show is meant to do though, the show is not meant to be a political show, Mike Judge even said that, it’s a show about populism, but it’s not a show about politics, and I think that it’s pretty reflective of life in Texas. So I grew up in the area that Arlen, Texas was based on, it was based on… Essentially an amalgamation of Garland, Texas and Richardson, Texas. I grew up, which are suburbs of Dallas, I grew up in Dallas, I graduated from Richardson High School, in Richardson Texas, and I grew up…

0:21:12.3 Nick Gillespie: Do you pledge allegiance to Don Meredith and Troy Aikman?

0:21:15.9 Landry Ayres: We did have to say The Texas pledge every day.

0:21:18.4 Kat Murti: We did have to say The Texas pledge, I refused to say the pledge all the way through school that don’t mean pledge things.

0:21:24.6 Landry Ayres: Yeah, “we have to” in quotes. Yeah.

0:21:28.4 Nick Gillespie: Kat, what was it like being a… It’s also… Because the Dallas-​Fort Worth area is so international and cosmopolitan, but it’s also like growing up as an ethnic minority right?

0:21:39.1 Kat Murti: Well, so that’s kind of… That’s quite interesting, so I always sort of related a little bit to Connie, ’cause she’s that Asian girl, she’s the children of immigrants, my parents are not Kahn or Minh, thankfully, I guess, they’re much more likeable people, I think.

0:21:58.4 Landry Ayres: I’m sure.

0:21:58.5 Nick Gillespie: So they got into a good country club.

0:22:02.7 Kat Murti: No, no country clubs in Dallas for us, unfortunately. But yeah, I definitely always related to Connie with that show and the show itself, growing up watching it, I loved it because it was a parody of the world around me, the people that I knew were exactly like the people in that show, the types of conflicts that’s what was happening around me all the time, including kind of like… There’s this casual racism that happens a lot of times with the… I’m not Laotian, I’m Indian, but the same thing with these folks.

0:22:38.3 Nick Gillespie: Get my bags, Mr. Kahn.

0:22:39.6 Kat Murti: So that or when they first meet… When the Souphanousinphones first move in, and the Hills go in to greet them, and I think Hank Hill says, “So are you Chinese or Japanese?” And he’s like, “Oh, we’re Laotians.” He’s like, “Oh okay, so is that Chinese or Japanese?” And they’re not doing it to be hateful, they just don’t know any better, which was sort of similar, folks would always bring us people who spoke a language that they didn’t speak that wasn’t English or Spanish, and they would bring them to our house and tell us, Okay, translate it, I don’t know what language they’re speaking, not one I know. But that was very… So I loved the show, I thought it was great, and then I moved to California and I learned other people like the show, and I was shocked, ’cause I was like, Why would you like a show about Richardson, Texas? What do you have… What is this and the thing is is that it’s a very… It’s like a slice of life show, and it’s just very realistic, and it’s the way that these characters interact, I think that that speaks to people, even if that’s not them, even if Luanne Platter’s name is not a funny joke to them because they grew up going to Luby’s and getting the Luanne Platter.

0:23:53.2 Landry Ayres: When I tell you Kat, that I just got that joke after all these years.

0:24:00.7 Kat Murti: Are you kidding me?

0:24:01.9 Landry Ayres: When you said Luby’s, it was like the Luanne Platter, I’m so dumb. I can’t believe it ’cause you best believe, we were…

0:24:08.4 Kat Murti: And entrees for sides and a dessert.

0:24:10.0 Landry Ayres: Oh my gosh, you loved the Luanne Platter and all the blue hairs are out there and you gotta join them, it’s… Oh my gosh, Luby’s.

0:24:15.5 Kat Murti: I gotta tell you, when… One of the biggest mass shootings in American history was at a Luby’s right, outside of Killeen, Texas, there in Killeen, Texas, and after eating there, I kind of understand the motivation of the shooter, what a terrible place.

0:24:32.2 Kat Murti: Too much yellow.

0:24:36.1 Landry Ayres: I will say Kat, it’s interesting that you really enjoyed it when you were younger and you… ’cause you were seeing it all around you, and…

0:24:41.7 Kat Murti: It’s like, this is the world that I live in, and was looking and I was like these kinds of conversations, these kind of like the conversations about things like sex ed or about Cinco de Mayo or those kinds of things. Like the people with the couch drinking the beer in the alley way and talking about lawn care, those were my neighbors.

0:25:03.2 Landry Ayres: Right, and Nick. You liked it because you had come from somewhere else and you were obviously with this different lens looking at the show and being like, “Well, they’re capturing it,” whereas I grew up in this very similar town, also in North Texas, Grapevine. I’m in Tarrant County, I’m on the other side of the airport. So I’m growing up with this very, very similar lifestyle, but I’m… For some reason, I saw the show and was like, Why would I wanna watch a show that’s just my life every single day. It was so realistic that I was like, “This is not exciting to me.”

0:25:41.5 Kat Murti: I think there’s a difference here and it’s that… Like I said, I related to Connie.

0:25:47.6 Landry Ayres: Sure. Absolutely.

0:25:48.9 Kat Murti: And so like I was kind of… I related to Connie, and I saw it as Luanne was the kind of girl that I wished I was. Hopefully less dumb, but I could… You’d want to grow up to be like, Nancy Gribble, but, yeah, but it was like this is… So I was also always looking at it through this lens of a little bit reserved, like, “This is not my culture, this is what I’m growing up in” and observing it through that, and so for me, it was kind of like, Oh yeah, this is… The show gets it. They’re seeing it the same way I’m seeing this.

0:26:17.9 Landry Ayres: There’s a bit of an outsider perspective going on there, not quite fitting in to something larger, even if you have just as much claim to it as the people that live there, whereas me coming from a Bobby Hill kind of place…

0:26:35.2 Nick Gillespie: Were you a Bobby Hill? Something wasn’t right with you?

0:26:38.9 Landry Ayres: You know, my dad didn’t ever say it quite out loud to me that way, but that I think there was an undercurrent of that there, and with both my brother and I, I think to an extent, those boys weren’t right. But luckily, they were loving and supportive in a way that Hank Hill can be. Exactly.

0:26:58.1 Nick Gillespie: Which is what’s beautiful, and I said this as a parent, one of the great dynamics of the show, and I think my older son was three years old or four years old when it came out, but each of the main kids, so it’s Bobby, Connie and Joseph are all problem children, somehow they’re atypical and they represent conflicts to their parents in profound ways, but they’re also totally identifiable because they all feel out of sorts, and I came to…

0:27:32.2 Kat Murti: I wouldn’t even say that they’re problem children because aren’t all children kind of problem children for their parents?

0:27:35.9 Nick Gillespie: Totally, absolutely, absolutely. And Kat I know you have a kid. So yeah, you’d know this, but that’s what’s so beautiful about it is, and ultimately they are loved by their parents, I choke up even thinking about when Dale who obviously somewhere in the insecticide soaked brain of his, he knows that Joseph is not his child, but he loves him.

0:27:57.4 Kat Murti: He said it. He said several times he thinks he…

0:28:00.0 Nick Gillespie: He loves him. Yeah, that he’s the child of an alien. And he loves him all the more, it’s like, it’s so beautiful. I came to King of the Hill as a huge Mike Judge Fan from Beavis and Butt-​Head. And my reading of Beavis and Butt-​Head on MTV was, it was a show that was teaching us as cable and as the internet, and as like the information age came upon us, and Beavis and Butt-​Head ultimately was a show about how do you consume and critique slick images and slick information that was coming in the form of music videos, but it was a tutorial on how to live in the information age. And that’s one of the reasons…

0:28:40.6 Kat Murti: You just made me want to go watch Beavis and Butt-​Head ’cause I always hated it.

0:28:42.1 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, it’s fantastic.

0:28:43.9 Kat Murti: ‘Cause I don’t like vulgarity. But I love Veggie Tales, I love Daria.

0:28:47.6 Nick Gillespie: It really made… It was didactic in the best way that popular culture can be, it like teaches you a method of how to kind of understand things, so I kind of brought that to King of the Hill, and I think in a way that’s what the show was doing. It was like scenario after scenario of like if you are a kind person but you are beset with all of these contradictions of like big-​ness versus individualism, collective identity, versus a marginal identity when you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin or in your community, like how do you deal with that? And that’s one of the functions I think, of King of the Hill, which was it gave us all ways of kind of just adjudicating these every day kind of conflicts in a way that was ultimately kind of resolved to be nice to each other. That really is ultimately the message of the show, which I think is actually deeply profound, not that different than South Park or even Family Guy in a lot of ways, these are all profoundly family-​based shows that take place ultimately, no matter how crass they may be, in a loving universe.

0:29:57.8 Kat Murti: Well, and they’re always coming back to these kind of moral lessons, it’s not like a Bible show, they’re not trying to hit you over the head with the morality, but they’re is a clear morality and there’s some more about that.

0:30:09.9 Nick Gillespie: Luanne’s manger babies.

0:30:11.2 Landry Ayres: Yeah, the manger babies.

0:30:11.3 Nick Gillespie: It’s not manger babies. But it’s something better than that. Yeah.

0:30:14.2 Kat Murti: Right. And it’s something that Hank Hill is struggling with these moral questions throughout the whole show, we started off talking about how he would vote and that’s like… That seems that fits… It would be an episode because it’s exactly the type of thing that Hank Hill struggles with throughout, even if it’s at the beginning, struggling with the role of Luanne in the family or all these other things, he’s constantly being exposed to things that he kind of… In his head, thinks are immoral or wrong, and then he’s learning like, Well, I still wanna be a loving, good human, and here’s how I’m gonna deal with it and… Yeah, I think that’s what makes the show good.

0:30:53.7 Nick Gillespie: One of the episodes, if I could just throw this out there, which I’ve read is Mike Judge’s favourite, it comes from the first or second season, and it’s called Junkie Business, and this gets to a kind of libertarian flavour, the show… I don’t think… Mike Judge may be a libertarian populist, but I don’t even know that his politics go…

0:31:14.7 Kat Murti: That deep.

0:31:15.5 Nick Gillespie: That he’s interested in politics at that level, but it’s when Hank hires a new guy, and he basically hires him, not because of his resume, but because he knows a lot about the Dallas Cowboys, and the guy turns out to be named Leon Petard, and he turns out to be a junkie, and he gets protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which famously George HW Bush signed into law, it was a big signature achievement in 1990. This came out in 1998, and then everybody at Strickland Propane starts to say, “Well, I have a disability too.” et cetera, and it’s this great thing where Hank is a good guy and he wants to give people the benefit of the doubt, but he also doesn’t wanna put up with bullshit, but this is where a kind of edict from on far… On high comes down, and then it ends up protecting somebody who’s acting in bad faith, and it creates a kind of viral phenomenon within the office where nothing gets done, and to me, that’s one of the paradigmatic examples of what the show is about, because Hank again is not… He’s not mean, He’s not nasty, but he also… He just explodes because this is unworkable.

0:32:26.8 Kat Murti: He’s a guy who cares about getting things done. I think one of my favorite Hank Hill quotes is, “There’s nothing sexier than a man with a 9:00 to 5:00 job, like that is Hank Hill. He believes like, “you have stuff, you get it done, you don’t complain about it,” and I think that’s also like… That’s a type of old Texas attitude too. That kinda carries through.

0:32:46.4 Landry Ayres: Yeah, why would you smoke weed? When you could just mow a lawn?

0:32:50.2 Nick Gillespie: One of the other things that I’ve really enjoyed about the show is that it is… It was on from 1997 to 2009, and so it bridges this weird gap where after the Cold War, in the ’90s, we had escaped history and all of that kind of stuff, which is kind of great. And then 9/11 happens, and the 21st century has just been a cluster fuck, but the aughts were a roller coaster of a decade and King of the Hill kind of bridges all of that, but it’s also showing a culture in transition, so I think Kat is right that Hank exemplifies a certain type of positive Texas manhood, but he’s so different than his father, and his father Cotton Hill, who is the World War II vet who the Japs blew his shins off and he killed 50 men and he’s just a complete jackass, he has a couple of moments of tenderness and kindness, but generally, he is something to be avoided, and everybody knows that and Hank is so much of a better person and a better father and a better worker than his father, it’s kind of great to see the historical continuity that the show does through all of its references to that stuff that is just wonderful, but is disappearing in real time, but also showing how things have changed and things can change for the better.

0:34:11.2 Kat Murti: Well, I think his relationship with his father is one of the big moral struggles for Hank, because Hank hates who Cotton Hill is as a person, not only because Cotton Hill treats him really poorly, he’s a terrible father, but he also hates just the kind of hateful, angry, aggressive, bigoted man who he is, he mistreat Peggy who’s Hank’s big treasure. He can’t stand people being…

0:34:38.0 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, Hank’s wife.

0:34:38.1 Kat Murti: Yeah, Hank’s wife, right.

0:34:40.3 Nick Gillespie: And Didi.

0:34:41.2 Kat Murti: And all of these things, he hates everything about him, and yet Hank has this idea that he needs to respect him, both because he’s his father, and because he’s his… Because he is a military veteran, and then you kind of see, that’s also a struggle with his mom’s… His mom gets remarried a couple of times, and Hank has that same struggle because these are men that he actually likes and finds to have that strong moral core and yet they don’t have those same outward stamps. They’re not actually his father. They’re not veterans, they’re the types of people that if he saw on paper, he would think he wouldn’t like, and it comes down to at the core, they’re just better people. And Hank is a much better person than Cotton ever will be.

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0:35:32.1 Landry Ayres: Are there any other lessons that we can learn from Hank as the central character, because he while not a total stand-​in for who every person who watches the show is going to be like some protagonists are, he’s certainly the one that we’re supposed to be rooting for and the one who we experience the world through his eyes 90% of the time. And we talked about the theme of kindness and community and coming together at the end of the day, and his sort of, at least attempt at a positive spin on masculinity in his community. Is there anything else that we could learn from him, whether it’s from things that he exemplifies in a positive way, or maybe even mistakes that he’s made, whether it’s the way that he handles his anger or the way that he runs his business at Strickland Propane, et cetera. What else do you make of what we can take away from Hank Hill at the end of the day?

0:36:24.9 Kat Murti: Well, so one thing that I think… So the show is actually most likely gonna be making a come back in the next year or two, they’ve announced that they’re working on another rendition of King of the Hill, it’s gonna be an older version of it, and I think at this point, our country is so terribly polarized, that having a character like Hank Hill, who is a conservative traditionalist kind of guy, he’s very traditional masculinity and he’s just a good kind person who’s able to work with lots of different people, who’s able to be a pillar of his community, no matter what that community is… And the kinds of people that they are and all the different things that they represent, I think that that hopefully will sort of influence the pop culture, the community that we see around us in America, which is really at a point where we’re not like that. It’s very polarized, people don’t want to interact with anyone on either side of it, they’re not open to that kind of person being a good person, and they’re also… The idea of conservatism as people see it now is certainly not Hank Hill’s conservatism, and so I do think that art influences culture, and I hope that this show comes back, that it’s just as good as it always has been, and I also hope that it gets just as popular and is able to kind of shift people back into a more harmonious and hopefully more positive interactions than we’ve been seeing the last several years.

0:38:00.0 Nick Gillespie: I do think that within Hank, there is a serious critique of the type of person he is though too, and so you mentioned how does he deal with his anger and he doesn’t deal with it very well, and he has medical problems throughout because of that, and he but he grows a little bit, he’s skeptical of yoga and of even stretching because somehow that seems a little bit Greenwich Village-​y or something like that. But he ultimately embraces it.

0:38:27.2 Kat Murti: He [0:38:27.3] ____ when he sees Bobby working out with Luanne and Peggy.

0:38:29.6 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and there’s a thing where his X-​rays where because he’s been eating meat his whole life, his colon is completely clogged, and so there’s a critique of who he is and how he… The limitations of him… I also think… And this will be interesting, I’m skeptical. This is not the first time that a new King of the Hill has been announced. There have been similar things like this for a while, so I hope it happens, I would love to see it, but I’m… I’ll reserve… I have my doubts for a while, but also there’s an episode where Hank realizes that he has been getting screwed by his car dealer, you know who he thinks has always been on the square with him and has given him a really good price, just a little bit over the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. And there’s a series of moments like that where Hank begins to realize that the system that he has put his faith in is actually not a legitimate system, or it hides a lot of chicanery and fraud and deception, and it takes advantage of people. And in a way, I also think if the show is updated from 2009 going forward, that is gonna be a big theme because this is a… Or rightly, it could be, what has happened to a…

0:39:52.4 Nick Gillespie: Now, everyone in America, I write a lot about this at Reason, if you go back 50 years, that the amount of trust and confidence in major institutions, whether it’s the government, whether it’s big business, whether it’s kind of third sector groups like the American Way, or the Catholic Church, trust and confidence in these institutions has just continued to go downwards because these institutions have been revealed as fake and fraudulent and self-​interested, but kind of making all of us do sacrifice in the name of their greater glory, and then you find out they’re full of shit. I think that’s a big part of the journey that Hank will have been on since we last saw him and Judge, when you look shows… Like Office Space…

0:40:41.2 Nick Gillespie: Again, I think Mike Judge is almost to TV and movies, what Bob Dylan is to music. This guy has a… A basically like a four decade legacy of at least once a decade just perfectly capturing and parroting and satirizing in a really deep knowing way what’s wrong with America, and in shows like Beavis and Butt-​Head, King of the Hill, Office Space captured a late ’90s Tech Culture, Emptiness, Idiocracy, which is slowly being revealed as documentary realism. It’s just that instead of it being 500 years in the future, it’s like 15 years in the future. And Silicon Valley just most recently captured this, so what happens like Can you be Hank Hill in a world where all of your illusions of… That the world is a kind and just place, that’s been… The institutions are not there to support you, what happens next? That’s really interesting territory, especially without it becoming very dark.

0:41:46.5 Landry Ayres: I look forward to, much like Bob Dylan, Mike Judge’s evangelical Christian reinvention.

0:41:52.6 Nick Gillespie: Oh God, yeah, that would be…

0:41:52.7 Landry Ayres: So that should be really, really funny.

0:41:55.0 Nick Gillespie: He’s like, he’s only a second marriage away from that, I suspect.

0:42:00.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah, and then we’ll get The Traveling Wilburys sort of rendition where he gets together with all the great comedy writers and they put out one album and then one of them dies.

0:42:05.2 Nick Gillespie: Wouldn’t that be great to, Matt Stone and Trey Parker and Seth McFarlane, all in a Traveling Wilburys cartoon thing, even if they have a lot of beef amongst each other, and The Simpsons guy. Can I ask you guys like… How do you compare… ’cause the one kind of pop cultural text that has been an absolute mainstay since before the collapse of the Soviet Union is The Simpsons, which is now in it’s like 800th year or something. And there’s interplay between the Simpsons and King of the Hill. Each… Characters of each have shown up in the other… How do you… Is it worth like thinking about King of the Hill in light of The Simpsons, which also made kind of prime time animation possible again, which is just remarkable too.

0:43:00.2 Kat Murti: I mean they’re both Americana, they’re both slices of Americana, they’re both about the every man middle class American family. Right, but I think that King of the Hill has one a lot more regional flavour, but two, in neither one, do you know exactly where the town is, they’re both made up towns, but Springfield is much more like somewhere in America, Arlen is somewhere in Texas.

0:43:25.8 Nick Gillespie: Yeah, or everywhere in America.

0:43:26.7 Kat Murti: Yeah, everywhere in America, that’s a better one. Right, I also just think that King of the Hill is more realistic. These could almost not be animation, this could almost be like just real people live acting this show and it would work just as well, versus the Simpsons has that cartoon aspect to it, it’s still a little bit over the top, it’s still a little bit about… It’s a little slap stick, it’s a little fun in that way that I think King of the Hill isn’t… And so I think that there are similar shows, but a little bit different, and one of the things that I think is actually worth noting here when it comes to realism is that King of the Hill is actually one of the very few animated shows, especially…

0:44:09.8 Kat Murti: I think it might have been the only one at it’s time that allows its characters to age a bit and allows them to grow and develop in a way that you don’t really see in shows like The Simpsons. Simpsons was on decades, decades of Simpsons and yeah, the animation style gets a little bit better, but they’re the same family, and there’s that internet meme that goes around where… That talks about how maybe part of the reason that the Simpsons isn’t as popular as it used to be, is simply because it’s not as depictive of what it’s like to be an average American family anymore, versus… I think King of the Hill, of course, it’s not on the air anymore, it hasn’t been for a while, but I think that it always kind of held on to what it was like to be a middle class family in Texas.

0:44:57.4 Landry Ayres: Right, and it’s about observing that world moving forward and changing and evolving in a way, and what it means to look at it and sometimes feel left behind, but sometimes be mired in this ever-​changing uncertain future, whereas the Simpsons is just kind of like… It’s this weird wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, locked-​in place, sort of like snow globe of a show, and then you’ve got shows like, like you mentioned, Beavis and Butt-​Head, which was all about a reaction to the slick packaged like media consumption of the era, and then moving forward even now, the big sort of animated series of, I think that came on after King of the Hill, Family Guy, obviously was a post Beavis and Butt-​Head, it was not about what it means to digest all of that media, it’s about where you go and the base of humor was what that did to people and how you can use jokes via this referential… Almost like the only reason I got half the jokes in Family Guy is because I love the ’80s and I love the ’70s, was on VH1 all the time, and I could sit there for six hours on a Saturday and be like, I understand what life in the 1980s was like. And so it’s interesting to see what King of the Hill might turn into…

0:46:22.4 Landry Ayres: In… If we jump forward in time, but if it will keep that element of trying to understand the world moving forward, but being stuck in the past or something like that, or if it will take a new type of perspective and sort of way of examining the world.

0:46:43.0 Nick Gillespie: I do… All of these, and I would throw South Park in of course as well. Like one thing that is great about the animated shows, and actually as long as we’re throwing everything in the hopper, Daria, which was kind of an outgrowth of Beavis and Butt-​Head.

0:46:55.6 Kat Murti: I love Daria.

0:46:56.3 Landry Ayres: It’s so good.

0:46:56.4 Nick Gillespie: Which I’ve also heard is getting some kind of update or something, potentially another very Texas show, it’s really set in a suburb of McMansions and whatnot. But one thing that I love about the animated shows, probably more than live action shows, is that they really reward close watching and the second screen phenomenon, like when you’re watching it and you don’t know who somebody is, that they build an episode around and like you can Google it while you’re watching it and you gain that enjoyment like… Again, I hate pop culture that is didactic, like this is the old Frankfurt School model of cultural theory, which is Donald Duck gets his punishment in movies so the assembly line worker takes his punishment at the workplace, that’s not how pop culture works, but it enacts and embodies and it kind of conjures all this interesting information and like what all of these shows did, and I thought this was really powerful in the ’90s as our world was exploding with so much more information, so many more sources, just everywhere, you really benefit from knowing history and from knowing art or even like earlier iterations of the show.

0:48:09.4 Nick Gillespie: The Simpsons is almost completely self-​referential now, it’s its own whole universe, and that can become annoying and frustrating after a while. But it’s a good way of thinking about the world like that when you’re walking down the street that you know a lot of everything that’s going on and the history of it, because if you know the history of it… And this is a very Marxist point on a libertarian podcast, but I think it’s absolutely right, if you can historicize the current moment and you understand the ways in which we got to the moment we got that. That it’s not just nature, it’s not just the way things happen, it’s a happenstance, things have happened for particular reasons, once you know that and you understand it and you can reference it, you can maybe direct things in a way that is… Hopefully, for all of us, I think, in the direction of freedom and liberty and human flourishing, so that’s a weird way to think about King of the Hill, but it’s like it might be essential to a 21st century that’s actually worth living in.

0:49:09.7 Kat Murti: I mean, that’s kind of the point of this show. To some extent, we all kind of do believe that pop culture has the ability to change the way that people think about decisions, think about our government, think about the way that we live, it’s Pop & Locke with the E.

0:49:27.0 Landry Ayres: And that’s exactly why I came up with that name. It was not just because of a pun, that’s… I totally had that line of thought when we brainstormed the name. It was on the cards.

0:49:37.8 Nick Gillespie: I hope you weren’t like Popper & Locke or something like that. Oral popper…

0:49:42.9 Landry Ayres: No, no, no, we never went that far, never that far.

0:49:43.2 Nick Gillespie: And the open society and to unlock or… Okay.

0:49:50.0 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at the handle @PopNLockePod, that’s Pop, the letter N, Locke with an E, like the philosopher, Pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, and please rate and review us if you like to show, we look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org and is produced by me, Landry Ayres. To learn more, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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