H A L C R O W T H E R on M O L L Y I V I N S

[dweller]

That's all she wrote: Remembering Molly Ivins

At the end of the film Venus, which stars Peter O'Toole as a decrepit actor holding off his final curtain, Vanessa Redgrave delivers a bleak line: "When you die, everyone wants to be your friend." Though I knew Molly Ivins forever—since the Kennedy administration—I would never claim that I knew her well. If I implied any special relationship, I'm sure that Molly, listening somewhere, would roll her eyes toward the heavens in one of those gestures of wry exasperation that all of us who knew her scrambled to avoid.

Even in graduate school, during the year at Columbia when I saw her every day, we were nothing approaching inseparable. If she felt I was still struggling with testosterone management, small wonder. At our first meeting, when we were undergraduates in Massachusetts, I was a lamentably unevolved member of one of the more notorious "animal houses" on the Ivy circuit. As irony would have it, a couple of her suitemates at Smith were dating my fraternity brothers. The first time I heard Molly's name, they were trying to "fix her up," as we said in those days, with a suitable blind date. Apparently several of these experiments had gone awry; boys had been traumatized. Molly came with more intelligence, sarcasm and undiluted Texasness than your average New England preppy had ever prepared for, not to mention an unsettling dose of pure height. As I recall it—there are living witnesses to correct my memory and rein in my exaggeration—we matched Molly with a power forward on a National Merit Scholarship, and still she put him in intensive care.

That some of these experiences might have been painful for Molly, too, was never considered. In spite of our lingering reputation for sissified Aquarian sensitivity, cross-gender empathy was almost unknown among college students of the '60s. There's more than a clue in a column she wrote about her treatment for cancer: "First they mutilate you; then they poison you, then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that."

The last time I saw her: Key West, the winter before last, at a literary seminar celebrating American humor. Mutual friends had been circulating grim rumors about her health. But Molly looked great. She was warm and funny, remembered all the weird characters we had in common and seemed pleased to see me. After 35 years of agreeing with her on nearly every issue, I may, at 60, have gained a small measure of maturity in her eyes. (Can you tell that it mattered to me?) Thanks to a couple of drinks I was able, even in the inhibiting presence of my wife and other humorists, to tell her how much I'd always appreciated her work and relied on her instincts.

http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A46338


The Red Rose of Texas
Photo by Jenny Warburg

a wonderful read,
dp

[Cooley Hurd]

1. K&R - great article, indeed!

RIP, sweet Molly,:(

[rubberducky]

2. What wonderful insight this Lady had.

IMHO Molly would have loved our own Nancy Greggs. Everytime I read a post by Nancy I can see Molly smiling!

[shirlden]

3. Amen

Can we hear an "Amen"???

Miss Ya, Molly

[Briar]

4. As every week goes by

I miss hearing from Molly Ivins. She really was indispensible and irreplaceable - the voice of an America the rest of the world could like and admire.

[dweller]

5. my kingdom

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'Every week she warned us that our birthright has been sold out from under us, that ruthless, careless corporations and the plutocrats who profit from them have created a cash-and-carry caricature of democracy. In her own words, which could not be mistaken for anyone else's words: "Oligarchy is eating our ass, our dreams, our country, our heritage, our democracy, our justice, and our tax code."

Either we figure out how to keep corporate cash out of the political system, she wrote last summer, "or we lose the democracy."

That's all she wrote. It's the only message that matters anymore, and you can stretch it to cover every issue that signifies—the wars, justice, health care, the economy, the environment. While you were watching American Idol and playing with your electro-toys, boardroom bandits drove away with everything you had. Corporate flunkies like George Bush ("the master of crony capitalism"—M.I.) and Dick Cheney are not the authors of our misery any more than Donald Rumsfeld was the author of the cataclysm in Iraq. They're just pieces on the chessboard where macro-capital plays its games and are lightning rods for the occasional outrage those games provoke. If you ever doubted the organic connection between Texas oil politics and the Middle East bloodbath, you never read Molly Ivins."
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for a horse, and a 5th rec.
dp