Remembering Molly Ivins

By John Nichols

The Nation

Wednesday 31 January 2007

Molly Ivins always said she wanted to write a book about the lonely
experience of East Texas civil rights campaigners to be titled No One Famous
Ever

Came. While the television screens and newspapers told the stories of the
marches, the legal battles and the victories of campaigns against
segregation

in Alabama and Mississippi, Ivins recalled, the foes of Jim Crow laws in the
region where she came of age in the 1950s and '60s often labored in
obscurity

without any hope that they would be joined on the picket lines by Nobel
Peace Prize winners, folk singers, Hollywood stars or senators.

And Ivins loved those righteous strugglers all the more for their
willingness to carry on.

The warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen with the purpose of
calling the rabble to the battlements, Ivins understood that change came
only

when some citizen in some off-the-map town passed a petition, called a
Congressman or cast an angry vote to throw the bums out. The nation's mostly
widely

syndicated progressive columnist, who died January 31 at age 62 after a long
battle with what she referred to as a "scorching case of cancer," adored the

activists she celebrated from the time in the late 1960s when she created
her own "Movements for Social Change" beat at the old Minneapolis Tribune
and

started making heroes of "militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students,
uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

"Troublemaker" might be a term of derision in the lexicon of some
journalists - particularly the on-bended-knee White House press pack that
Ivins studiously

refused to run with - but to Molly it was a term of endearment. If anyone
anywhere was picking a fight with the powerful, she was writing them up with

the same passionate language she employed when her friend the great Texas
liberal Billie Carr passed on in 2002. Ivins recalled Carr "was there for
the

workers and the unions, she was there for the African-Americans, she was
there for the Hispanics, she was there for the women, she was there for the
gays.

And this wasn't all high-minded, oh, we-should-all-be-kinder-to-one-another.
This was tough, down, gritty, political trench warfare; money against
people.

She bullied her way to the table of power, and then she used that place to
get everybody else there, too. If you ain't ready to sweat, and you ain't
smart

enough to deal, you can't play in her league."

Molly Ivins could have played in the league of the big boys. They
invited her in, giving her a bureau chief job with the New York Times -
which she

wrote her way out of when she referred to a "community chicken-killing
festival" in a small town as a "gang-pluck." Leaving the Times in 1982 was
the best

thing that ever happened to Molly. She settled back in her home state of
Texas, where her friend Jim Hightower was about to get elected as
agricultural

commissioner and another friend named Ann Richards was striding toward the
governorship. As a newspaper columnist for the old Dallas Times Herald -
and,

after that paper's demise, for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram - Molly began
writing a political column drenched in the good humor and fighting spirit of

that populist moment. It appealed beyond Texas, and within a decade she was
writing for 400 papers nationwide.

As it happened, the populist fires faded in Texas, and the state
started spewing out the byproducts of an uglier political tradition - the
oil-money

plutocracy - in the form of George Bush and Dick Cheney.

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the
country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving
Minnesotans and

Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as
delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote
about

their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George
W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential expos of the man the Supreme

Court elected President. And Ivins's columns tore away any pretense of
civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

When Washington pundits started counseling bipartisanship after voters
routed the Republicans in the 2006 elections, Molly wrote, "The sheer
pleasure

of getting lessons in etiquette from Karl Rove and the right-wing media
passeth all understanding. Ever since 1994, the Republican Party has gone
after

Democrats with the frenzy of a foaming mad dog. There was the impeachment of
Bill Clinton, not to mention the trashing of both Clinton and his wife -
accused

of everything from selling drugs to murder - all orchestrated by that
paragon of manners, Tom DeLay.... So after 12 years of tolerating lying,
cheating

and corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave
with bipartisan manners.

"Given Bush's record with the truth, this bipartisanship sounds like a
bad idea on its face," Ivins continued, in a column that warned any Democrat

who might think to make nice with President and his team that "These people
are not only dishonest - they're not even smart."

Her readers cheered that November 9, 2006, column, as they did
everything Molly wrote. And the cheers came loudest from those distant
corners of Kansas

and Mississippi where, often, her words were the only dissents that appeared
in the local papers during the long period of diminished discourse following

9/11. For the liberal faithful in Boise and Biloxi and Beaumont, she was a
lifeline - telling them that, yes, Henry Kissinger was "an old war
criminal,"

that Bush had created a "an honest to goodness constitutional crisis" when
it embarked on a program of warrantless wiretapping and that Bill Moyers
should

seek the presidency because "I want to vote for somebody who's good and
brave and who should win." (The Moyers boomlet was our last co-conspiracy,
and

in Molly's honor, I'm thinking of writing in his name on my Democratic
primary ballot next year.)

For the people in the places where no one famous ever came, Molly Ivins
arrived a couple of times a week in the form of columns that told the local

rabble-rousers that they were the true patriots, that they damn well better
keep pitching fits about the war and the Patriot Act and economic
inequality,

and that they should never apologize for defending "those highest and best
American ideas" contained in the Bill of Rights.

Often, Molly actually did come - in all of her wisecracking,
pot-stirring populist glory.

Keeping a promise she'd made when her old friend and fellow Texan John
Henry Faulk was on his deathbed, Molly accepted a steady schedule of invites

to speak for local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in dozens
of communities, from Toledo to Sarasota to Medford, Oregon. Though she could

have commanded five figures, she took no speaker's fee. She just came and
told the crowds to carry on for the Constitution. "I know that
sludge-for-brains

like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being 'un-American,' but when Bill
O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for
him

just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement
conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years," she told

them. "The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one
person's rights, it can take away everyone's."

She also told them, even when she was battling cancer and Karl Rove,
that they should relish the lucky break of their consciences and their
conflicts.

Speaking truth to power is the best job in any democracy, she explained. It
took her to towns across this great yet battered land to say: "So keep
fightin'

for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin'
it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the
fraidy-cats,

rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get
through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure
to tell

those who come after how much fun it was."

Gathered by Joe Harcz
Posted by Miriam V
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