originally written two weeks after her death in 2007
reposted as a documentary about her is coming out
Newspaper columnist Molly Ivins, who influenced my writing style more
than any other living author, with the possible exception of Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr., died last week. I am still in mourning. Her death comes
just a few weeks after another of my
favorite, humorous, acid-tongued, brilliant columnist, Art Buchwald, died.
Ivins,
62, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, which recurred in 2003
and returned again in November 2005. She said, "Having breast cancer is
massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison
you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that."
In
the days after Ivins’ death I was struck by the range of voices singing
her praises, from predictable leftie supporters Bill Moyers and Jim
Hightower to poet Maya Angelou to humorists Dave Barry and Mark Russell.
Heck, even Shrub himself, as she famously dubbed President Bush, made a
compliment about her.
She would have been embarrassed about the
attention and praise, judging by comments and actions in more than 20
tribute articles I read about her in the last week to prepare this
piece. For example, two articles mention that she made a habit of using
awards she won for her columns as serving utensils at meals.
Anthony
Zurcher, her editor for Creators Syndicate, wrote that at one of her
unforgettable parties at her Austin home he noticed her dining table was
“littered with various awards and distinguished speaker plaques, put to
use as trivets for steaming plates of tamales, chili and fajita meat.
When I called this to her attention, Molly matter-of-factly replied,
‘Well, what else am I going to do with ‘em?’”
As
Mark Russell put it, in the funniest thing I’ve heard him say in a
decade, “Most people who speak for a living will tell you that every
plaque or award represents a free speech. Some people put them up on
their walls. Molly used them as trivets. Molly didn’t rest on her
laurels, she ate off of them.”
Early career highlights include when, as the first female police beat reporter for the
Minneapolis Tribune, the department named its mascot — a pig — in her honor.
She
was best known for covering the always-colorful Texas Legislature. She
once said, "I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a
harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting
adults."
I used to tell people I wanted to be a male Molly Ivins,
by which I meant eloquent, witty, sharp, and good at capturing an image
in just a few words. That was, of course, ignoring the minor differences
between us. I was a Southern Californian male and she was a southern
woman who shocked
The New York Times by wearing blue jeans, going barefoot, and bringing her dog, named Shit, into the newsroom.
I had to chuckle at how
The New York Times,
famous for playing it safe with language, addressed this topic in the
article reporting on her death. The article said she brought to work
“her dog, whose name was an expletive.” I find it ironic that the
Times apparently
had a quandary over how to mention her dog without uttering a
profanity. It is ironic because of her own odd relationship with
The New York Times.
The New York Times
liked her style and hired her in 1976 as a political reporter. You know
how sometimes you can watch a couple and know that it will never work
out between them? Such is the case with Ivins and the
Times.
She’s known for saying things shocking but accurate, like writing in her
obituary of Elvis Presley that the scene at Graceland was part national
cheerleading camp and part Shriners convention.
The Times
is known for being straight-laced. They would edit the color out of her
story. She has described her idea of hell as "being edited by the
Times copy desk for all eternity." She has suggested that if she said "squawked like a $2 fiddle," the
Times copy
editors would change it to "an inexpensive instrument." In one story,
Ivins described someone as "having a beer gut that belongs in the
Smithsonian." That ended up in the paper as "a man with a protuberant
abdomen."
The end came when Ivins was sent to cover a community
chicken festival in New Mexico and she wrote a reference to it being “a
gang pluck.” The newspaper refused to run the phrase and she and the
grey lady parted ways. She returned to covering Texas politics. She got a
larger audience and a syndicated column, and began writing about
national and international issues. Her syndicated column ran in more
than 300 newspapers at the time of her death
Let me give some examples of Ivins’ wit:
On
vegetarianism: "I know vegetarians don't like to hear this, but God
made an awful lot of land that's good for nothing but grazing."
On politicians: “If God keeps hangin’ around with politicians, it’s gonna hurt his reputation.”
On
gun control: "I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of
the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in
order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would
promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great
runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while
cleaning their knives."
On Americans: "I think there's more of us
who still believe that Elvis is alive than understand the Theory of
Relativity, but that's all right. It's fun to live in a country with
some peculiar people. How boring it would be if everybody was quite
sane."
She knew her remarks were too sharp for some, telling
People
magazine in 1991, “There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us
chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity – like what Garrison
Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and
ridicule – that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the
powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire
is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel – it's vulgar." Boy, did
she use that weapon.
Of Pat Buchanan’s hate-filled speech at the
1992 Republican Convention she wrote that his speech “probably sounded
better in the original German.” Of ultraconservative U.S. Rep. Jim
Collins, R-Dallas, in the early 1980s, she wrote: "If his IQ slips any
lower, we'll have to water him twice a day."
Some readers and
advertisers tried to organize a boycott over these and other statements
made by her. Her editors rented billboards proclaiming, “Molly Ivins
Can’t Say That, Can She”? I remember that slogan well as it became the
name of the first of her six books.
It was around this time that I
got to know and love her. Not only did I read it, I also started to
encourage others to read it. I remember subscribing to a magazine filled
with syndicated columns and hers was the only one I read regularly.
While reading the articles after she died, I was searching for a good description of her appeal and I think
Salon said it best:
“This, really, is the secret of Ivins’ genius – the balance of humor
and passion. There are columnists out there who have one or the other,
but without the two together, there's half a loaf. Columnist Dave
Barry, for example — he beat Ivins to a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 — is
funny, but you don't get the sense that he cares particularly deeply
about anything. On the other hand, a columnist like Ellen Goodman is
passionate, but goes down something like medicine.
As
with many in the media industry Ivins has been concerned about the
direction it is going. She told one newspaper she's tired of being asked
if she minds being part of a ‘dying’ industry. ‘What really pisses me
off,’ she asserts, ‘is being part of one that's committing suicide.’"
She
did not buy into the blog versus "traditional media" battle. "I think
this so-called war or competition between bloggers and the mainstream
media is just plain silly. We all need to be supporting one another. I'm
fond of many bloggers I read."
Ivins got involved in the civil
rights movement while attending Smith College in the early 1960s. She
was struck by the realization that she said creates all Southern
liberals: "Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you
start to question everything."
I started reading her in college
when I was having some of my own questions about race, as I was running
the newspaper and writing columns and editorials at Cal Poly Pomona amid
the Rodney King/Darryl Gates saga in nearby Los Angeles. I was
searching for my voice at the time and finding that self-deprecation.
Heck, I called my own column “Butki’s Babbles” and it worked well. Ivins
was known to do the same thing from time to time.
While she wrote
great copy, there is one book she never wrote much to the regret of me
and others: her memoir. When asked about it, she said she had too many
other things she wanted to do first. That’s Molly – always finding time
for others.
After being diagnosed, she used her celebrity to
increase awareness of breast cancer and encouraged women to get
mammograms. When she recently grew too weak to write her columns, she
dictated the last two.
Most of my heroes — Martin Luther King Jr.
and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, to name the first two that come to mind —
are dead. Now Molly has joined them. I can picture those three in
heaven with her telling a story that made them all blush and then burst
out laughing.
Goodbye, Molly. I’ll miss you. You done good. And no, I ain’t done bragging on you just yet.
I
want to close with one more gem of wisdom she once wrote: “Politics is
not a picture on the wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you
don’t much care for.”
Martin finds things are not as it seems as far as the story told about the
incident and, while investigating, there are fires, a fatal car accident
and he falls in love with a local resident. 