Molly Ivins (1944-2007) was born into Texas’ rural populist tradition, a liberal hell-raising troop that rose and fell in the shadow of Lyndon Johnson.
I got to watch her kind close-up in the 1970s and they always had more fun than their conservative rivals. Knowing they were a minority, they spoke truth to power relentlessly, without fear or favor. They attached themselves to the fashion accessories of the Texas Myth — the boots, the shirts, the hats, the careless attitude — yet always identified with the downtrodden, the small farmers, the ranchers with small spreads, the oil hands.
If you want to hear her voice, still, just listen. It’s more wry than she was, more city than country, but her attitudes did not die, just her body.
Molly was one of the most brilliant writers in our language, but she
learned her trade at newspapers, so she spoke in columns, not in
novels. She knew her job was to entertain, and she made certain she did
so, no matter how angry she felt inside, no matter how serious her
subject. There have been few like her in all our history — Jimmy
Breslin, Mike Royko, Art Buchwald, O.Henry and George Ade at the 20th
century’s dawn. There’s a job opening.
Underneath Molly’s humor was a deep patriotism and a true
liberalism, which taught not that everyone should end up the same but
that society is measured by the size of the opportunity it gives all
its kids. Texas Republicans destroyed her kind, politically, by filling
the prairies with suburbs, and teaching those people to quell their
fear of falling by hoping to rise, exalting the wealthy and praying to
the TV. Their narrow view of politics — support us and fear the other
— is very popular in suburban Texas. Liberalism is now so thoroughly
identified with Mexicans and blacks that it has no chance statewide, so
Texas became a one-party state, with the corruption attendant to all
such states.
Molly Ivins had a mission in life, which was to turn that around.
She spent her life in what I’d call the AntiThesis, uncomfortably so,
because her own politics had more to do with FDR and William Jennings
Bryan than George McGovern and John Kerry. She found Clinton slick, and
only came to love Carter late.
She leaves us with her mission half-done. Democrats not only have
Congress, but the political wind at their back, for the first time in a
generation. Molly Ivins wasn’t good at this political prosperity thing, she was a poet of
political poverty, the small campfire of liberals swapping stories and
passing a bottle, surrounded by a cruel conservative world.
It is up to those of us in the Netroots to finish the drill for her,
to not only take power but to do something positive with it. She lived
and worked in a mass media age. Ours is a micro-media age. Every one of
you can be like Molly, every one of you can tell stories and bring
people with you. Everyone of us is a newspaper columnist now.
For her sake, be a good one. Finish the drill. Bring America back to
the one she dreamed of, and her laughter will ring down from heaven.
