King of the Hill

As the quality of The Simpsons has waned, my husband and I have gained a new appreciation for King of the Hill. Admittedly, this show's quality has also waned inevitably with age, but it is in syndication on Fox, and we enjoy catching an episode here and there. One thing I've noticed about the show, and something I greatly appreciate about it, is that the main character, Hank Hill, is a truly good husband and father. Like Homer Simpson, so many other TV fathers are bumbling self-centered idiots. They always seem to redeem themselves by the end of the episode, but getting out of the doghouse is a nearly constant challenge for them. Not so for Hank Hill; he's the opposite of the usual TV father. I would marry a Hank Hill in a heartbeat.

But Hank Hill has his flaws too. In the episode I watched last night, Hank is supposed to take his 12-year-old son, Bobby, on a hunting trip to kill his first deer and become a man. But Hank is nervous about making the trip because he'll have to spend hours alone, talking, with his son. Hank is uncomfortable talking about anything particularly personal or private, yet Bobby has been brought up by his mother to be open and honest. Due to his fear, Hank procrastinates on getting a hunting license, and on the day of the trip, he discovers that all the hunting licenses have been sold out. Bobby will have to remain a boy for another year. The story is poetically resolved as Hank, hoping to give his son the rite of passage into manhood that he is due, allows Bobby to drive his truck. A deer runs out into the street and Bobby hits it, finally getting his kill so that he may be a man.

This episode pokes plenty of fun at this particular rite of passage, presumably a Texan one, that requires a boy to kill in order to be considered a man, but it never mocks rites of passage themselves. In the last line of the episode, as the neighbors are admiring Bobby's kill, he says,

"I couldn't have done it without my dad."

This reminded me of my husband's assertion that in order for a boy to become a man, he must demonstrate physical superiority to his father. Perhaps that was my husband's particular rite of passage, and clearly such rites do vary for different people. Nevertheless, I'm detecting a pattern that a boy's initiation into manhood seems to always involve, and perhaps requires, the participation of the boy's father. Is this part of the reason that so many fatherless sons have so many behavioral and emotional problems, and as adults seem to never grow up?