Political columnist and merciless skewerer of the mighty Molly Ivins succumbed to breast cancer on January 31st, and I'm damn sorry to see her go. She's one of the few columnists I actually admire, someone who never backed down and who did more to "speak truth to power" (in a phrase that is losing its original Quaker punch) than almost anyone else in the current press. Embodying her philosophy and method is the title of one of her books, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? There was bloody little she wouldn't say, I suspect, if she felt it was both true and important, regardless of which powerful figure it might alienate. Right up to her death, she was defying "Shrub" as the dubbed him after her long acquaintance with him as Governor of Texas. In one of her last columns she wrote, "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders and we need to raise hell." With her death and the death of Ann Richards, Texas lost two of its best, and is now, as my friend Rob points out, a largely foreign country belonging mostly to rich white men.
I found out about her death in a Times obit, which not only somehow failed to mention what a hell-raiser she was, but in another good show of their institutionalized sexism, managed to subtly denigrate her. For starters, instead of discussing her work with a serious tone, they chose to tell a largely harmless anecdote of Ivins running around the Times office barefoot and in jeans with her dog "whose name was an expletive." The tone of this particular anecdote was "we are not amused." But Ivins was not afraid to tell any emperor about his clothes, new or otherwise. Like many women with the courage to defy, she was branded by the Times with the term "feisty," a word any woman of substance and conviction despises for its "isn't that cute?" connotation. They also oddly confined her list of subjects to Texas, as though she could be safely filed under "regional author," which is too often another "isn't that cute?" category. All it takes is a glance at her recent columns at Alternet to show otherwise.
In truth, Ivins took aim at Rush Limbaugh, Bush, Dick Cheney, and anyone else who seemed to be hornswoggling their constituents or the general public. She decried the White House's policies on global warming, torture, separation of church and state, immigration, workers rights, the economy, the war in Iraq and how we got there, free speech, and just about anything else that struck her as bad politics (so much to make fun of!). No fool was safe from Ivins's scathing pen. And underneath all of it was compassion for the rest of us schmoes. Ivins description of The Texas Observer, where she first developed the voice that matched her philosophy, a paper where she could "tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have,” could have been her personal motto.
RIP, Ms. Ivins. You've made history.
Comments