Molly Ivins, a journalist and best-selling author from Texas known for witty columns lambasting the Bush administration, passed away on Jan. 31st, 2007. In her last column, published in the Texas Observer Jan. 26th, contained a challenge to the American people to act:
…every single
day, every single
one of us needs
to step outside
and take some action
to help stop this
war. Raise hell.
Think of something
to make the ridiculous
look ridiculous.
Make our troops
know we”re
for them and trying
to get them out
of there. Hit the
streets to protest
Bush’s proposed
surge. If you can,
go to the peace
march in Washington
on Jan. 27. We
need people in
the streets, banging
pots and pans and
demanding, “Stop
it, now!”
Below is a memorial for Ivins written by John Nichols of The Nation:
Remembering Molly Ivins
By John Nichols, The Nation,1/31/07
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 exposé 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 “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.”