Cotton Hill: In Memoriam

He was a bastard. He was a jerk. He was one of the most unlikable men ever to grace television. But damn if he wasn't one of the funniest old coots of all time. His name was Cotton Hill and he treated his son Hank like dirt. At the same time he was a grandfather willing to put his own freedom on the line to safe his grandson. It was impossible to like Cotton Hill, patriarch of King of the Hill, and it was impossibly easy to put yourself in his daughter-in-law's position of not exactly caring whether he lived or died in the recent episode when he did the former. And yet, there was something about the man that commanded a little bit of respect.

Cotton Hill lost his shins during the big one, WWII, The War and before that unfortunate event he managed to single-handedly kill fitty men. (That's not a typo; it is how he pronounced the word fifty.) He was a bona fide war hero. At the same time he was a misanthropic, misogynistic piece of trash that treated his first wife little better than you would a cockroach and his son even worse. He also had two children, at least that he knew of. A half-Japanese offspring that result from an affair with a nurse while he recovered from losing his shins, and a baby that he produced with his second wife; a woman who had attended kindergarten with his first son Hank. Cotton Hill was the very epitome of a right-wing, reactionary, conservative Texas sumbitch; he was a cartoon version of men who have been running the country for the past few years. (Except that unlike the "Texan" at the top he wasn't born in Connecticut and schooled in expensive east coast private schools that overlooked things like bad grades.)