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Gavin Newsom and the Plight of ‘Hank Hill Ass’

The white men in your life are suffering from critical buttocks deficiency

As a Californian, I do not like having Gavin Newsom for my governor. I do not like that he kneecapped the state’s high-speed rail project. I don’t like his garbage housing policies, either. I don’t like his little color risk tiers for managing the response to surging COVID-19 cases., and I certainly don’t like knowing that when he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle (who is currently dating Donald Trump Jr.), they did a “sexy” photo spread for Harper’s Bazaar, which called them “the New Kennedys.” Most recently, I disliked learning that Newsom flouted pandemic guidance to attend a lobbyist’s birthday dinner at a three-star Michelin restaurant.

A slickster politician supping on French delicacies in wine country with a dozen other people while the rest of us are canceling Thanksgiving to keep grandma alive… it’s a perfectly formed scandal. His apology sucked, too. But, for perhaps the first time, I felt a twinge of sympathy for California’s chief executive. That’s because photos of the incident revealed his tragic ass.

Maybe it’s just an unfortunate bunching of the dad jeans. More likely, though, Newsom is afflicted with a condition that I and countless other white guys suffer from: flat-ass, no-ass, negative ass, or, in pop culture parlance, “Hank Hill ass,” a term that comes to us from an episode of the animated sitcom King of the Hill. In “Hank’s Back Story,” the patriarch of the show discovers that his back pain is the result of “diminished gluteal syndrome,” i.e., an absence of buttocks. To his humiliation, he’s forced to wear an orthotic that rounds out his posterior.

In the Age of the Ass, it’s an extra bummer to have none. Yet whatever the cultural moment, the plight of the assless is real and painful. Without that natural cushioning, the vast majority of chairs, benches and public transit seating are forever uncomfortable. Toilets, also! You feel top-heavy all the time; without a booty for ballast, you’re easily knocked off-balance. And anybody turning around to check you out when you walk by will be sorely disappointed, since, as Newsom demonstrates, your pants always look weirdly loose or deflated back there.

Anyway, back to shitting on Newsom for undermining a serious public health response in a way that allows virus skeptics to argue that social distancing and mask mandates are purely for show. The difference is I now see what he’s working with in the rear, and I understand how bony hindquarters would lead you to abandon all ethics and principles. Get this man some padding.