Molly

America loses a journalistic legend

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
1/31/07
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/molly.htm

I remember reading Molly Ivins’ column a few days after her father died. She detailed his strength and humor, and how the cancer had picked him apart a little bit at a time, but how he kept his courage right to the end.

Then she spoke of him stepping out back on the porch to enjoy a few minutes sunlight, and how she heard the shot, and went out and found his body.

Writing about something so deeply and painfully intimate as that, knowing that millions would be reading it, was an act of extraordinary courage. Baring your soul, discussing openly and courageously what in many families would be a dark, never-discussed secret.

Not all of Molly’s readers were friends. Some were anxious to find a way of hurting her. I’m sure some of them tried. I’m equally sure that Molly saw them coming ten miles away.

Molly could take extraordinary courage and make it seem a commonplace. She was able to find it in others because she had it in herself.

She always, always, always had humor, and for a while, that made her something of a rarity in liberal circles. In the Reagan years, liberal voices were of what I thought of as the Mother Jones variety: articulate, knowledgeable, comprehensive and generally dry. Liberalism – and the country – need their Noam Chomskys and Bruce Cockburns, but they also need their Will Rogers and their Jim Hightowers and their Garry Trudeaus.

And, of course, their Molly Ivins.

In the late eighties and early nineties, there were few liberal voices to be heard. Radio, television, newspapers, magazines and schools and bookstores were under unrelenting pressure from the right to stop being “the librul media” and start talking like just plain folks. That didn’t work with Molly: she spoke just like plain folks. Nobody was about to pretend that Molly was effete or a member of the elite. She would have brayed with laughter at the thought, a good old fashioned horse laugh.

Molly’s coverage of the Texas Legislature is the stuff of legend. She was covering a wild and lunatic collection of reactionaries, retreads, loons and horse thieves, and she found it the greatest show on earth, and brought it to us, in down home homilies.

She brought the same flair to the national scene. She recognized Newt Gingrich for what he was, and found him hilarious. Years later, I was watching a fine animated movie called “The Incredibles” and there was a short, cocky, nasty strutting little peacock of a man in it called Syndrome, and unbidden, I thought, “I’m seeing Newt Gingrich through Molly’s eyes!”

Like most people who enjoy politics and don’t believe Ronald Reagan was God, I have several of Molly’s books kicking around. Political books, especially political humor books, tend to have a short shelf life. But with Molly, you tended to pull them out and re-read them years later, and find yourself enjoying them just as much. I think it was because for all that she ridiculed and joked about politicians, she always seemed to notice and touch the humanity under the Syndrome costumes and the cheap, arrogant venality.

Back in 1995, I wrote a piece about the incredible stand-off between Willie Brown and the newly-minted Republican assembly in California. It was only nominally Republican – Willie Brown wasn’t interested in giving up power, and the Pubs, who had a one-seat majority, also had a member who ran – and won – both the state assembly seat and the state senate seat in his district, and once in, discovered he couldn’t hold both offices. While he was dithering over which seat to take and thus not participating in either House, Willie was able to suborn another Republican, giving him a very precarious majority in the Assembly. He made the suborned Republican his puppet speaker (who got every Democratic vote and not one Republican vote except for her own), and when she discovered her fellow Republicans were no longer speaking to her, make a remark about them being “angry white men with small penises.” Someone – and many suspect Willie Brown – snuck into the legislative offices of the Republicans a few nights later and left tins of Vienna Sausages on their desks.

As I was writing it, I wished Molly would see it. Not only was it exactly the sort of political story she would love, but I figured it would show her that California politics could be just as tawdry, loony, exasperating, deadly and hilarious as those in Texas. Take THAT, Molly!

It wasn’t the only time Molly was at the back of my head when I wrote essays. More than once, I would sit down to write about something I was sizzling mad over, and would get about three paragraphs’ worth of invective in, and read it, and wonder how Molly would handle it. That didn’t necessarily give me inspiration – I’m not Molly, after all – but I would at least toss out the invective and start over in a calmer voice. And sometimes the Molly influence would take hold, and I would take something that started out as a really pissy essay and end up with something I was laughing out loud at by the end. Instead of cussing out Newt Gingrich, I would be laughing at Syndrome, if that makes any sense.

I think Molly, more than anyone, kept the spirit of humor and affection alive and in front of the public during the grim years of the nineties and early naughties, and we all owe her our sanity and maybe our very lives for that.

I can’t say I feel sad, because I feel so incredibly, remarkably lucky to have been able to read and enjoy her work for all these years.

Thanks for everything, Molly.