February 01, 2007
Mary Tyler Ivins, 1944-2007
(click the right pic for a larger view)
It's not been a good last couple of months for progressive Texas icons, as Ms. Molly Ivins passed away Wednesday evening after a long battle with cancer. I'm sure that my influences would shudder to be mentioned by me, but reading her columns back in high school and college were real eye-openers for me, both stylistically (exposing the absurd and unjust with the lightest, but most cutting, of touches) and politically (highlighting the injustices themselves and stirring the conscience of an apathetic suburbanite).
I only got to meet her once, at my university's Susan B. Anthony day in 1992, when she was the keynote speaker. Ann Richards had just been elected governor, the Republican control of the White House was waning, and things seemed a bit more hopeful. Her talk had a great sense of history both of the state we love/hate and of the various civil rights struggles she had witnessed and participated in. As it stands, her own personal anecdotes from being a pioneering journalist/columnist since the late 60s (a good retrospective found here) always made for better material than her takes on the current events of the day, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in these passages from the introduction to her book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?, which I bought in the university bookstore in 1991 and have held on to ever since:
"In my youth, I aspired to be a great journalist. George Orwell, Albert Camus, and I.F. Stone were my heroes. Great writers and intellectuals who helped illuminate their times. But look, God gave those guys fascism, communism, colonialism, and McCarthyism to struggle against. All I got was Lubbock. It's not my fault."
"Having being properly reared by a right-wing family in East Texas, how'd I turn out this peculiar? I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point-- race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything."
"I suspect there are a couple of other factors accounting for the odd hitch in my getalong. Being female, for starters. Can't say I've ever come to any particularly cosmic conclusions about gender, but when you start out in a culture that defines your role as standing on the sidelines with pom-poms to cheer while the guys get to play the game, it will raise a few questions in your mind."
"From the first moment I saw the Texas Legislature (in 1971), I adored it... it was reporter-heaven. Some sensitive souls are sickened by it, a few find it merely distasteful, and others persist in reporting on it in a way that squeezes all the juice and life out of it."
"So in my early days at the [Texas] Observer, when I would denounce some sorry sumbitch in the Lege as an egg-suckin' child-molester who ran on all fours and had the brains of an adolescent pissant, I would courageously prepare myself to be horse-whipped at the least. All that ever happened was, I'd see the sumbitch in the capital the next day, he'd beam, spread his arms, and say 'Baby! Yew put mah name in yore paper!'"
"According to Texas legend, in 1836, when Sam Houston, master of the strategic retreat, and the Texan Army finally allowed Santa Anna and the Mexicans to catch up with them.. the Texans waded into the sleeping Mexicans at San Jacinto... the panicked Mexicans tried to scramble away, screaming, 'Me no Alamo!'... it has come to mean 'Hey, don't blame me. I didn't do it.' All the stuff I report in this book happened. I didn't make up any of it. Me no Alamo."
Thanks for everything, Molly.
Goddamn. That's just the worst suckin' news I've heard in months.
More than any other political columnist I can think of, she was on the 10% side of Sturgeon's Law.
Posted by: jackd at January 31, 2007 07:38 PMIt's a shame she had to go now, just when things were likely to look better. I suspect she might have gotten some enjoyment out of the next few years.
She was a hell of a Texan.
Posted by: baltar at January 31, 2007 07:38 PMSuch a shame. At least lived long enough to see Shrub get the spiritual depantsing he so richly deserved in the midterms.
Posted by: Otto Man at January 31, 2007 08:40 PMamen.
Posted by: rip molly at January 31, 2007 10:31 PMIt was always comforting to see her essays in my local paper, especially in contrast to the likes of Coulter and other right wing whackos syndicated there. I enjoyed her pieces, her style, and even when there were areas of disagreement, she fleshed out her position well enough to make me reevaluate my own. She'll be missed. And she is going to be next to impossible to replace.
"I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world."
--Margaret Mead
Thank you Molly for your legacy.
"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?"
Posted by: ChrisV82 at February 1, 2007 12:48 AMYou'll appreciate this video of her doing a speech.
Posted by: Clancy at February 1, 2007 09:10 AMSee Molly Ivins at her satirical best in a video called “The Dildo Diaries”...here:
Posted by: Daniel DiRito at February 1, 2007 10:18 AMi had wondered why our community paper stopped running even repeats of her columns a few weeks back. Complementing the videos, she usually read her own books on tape, which you can find at a library near you. The first one on Bush should have been mailed to every voter prior to the 2000 election.
Posted by: paperpusher at February 1, 2007 10:50 AM