Molly Ivins: Fire And Light

Isaiah J. Poole

February 01, 2007

It wasn’t always fun being in charge of the editorial page of a newspaper in State College, Pa., where splotches of light blue floated precariously in a sea of red, but the days I got to publish Molly Ivins’ columns were always the most joyous.

Today progressives are paying tribute to Ivins , who left us January 31 after a long battle with cancer at the age of 62, as both a progressive firebrand and a light of hope.

It took my getting a job outside the Beltway to be exposed to Ivins regularly. It may be that papers like The Washington Post found her a little too plain-spoken and sharp-elbowed for inside-the-Beltway discourse. She knew that when it comes to the hypocrisy, double-dealing and shortchanging of the people’s interest in governments from Washington to her beloved Texas, it takes more than a genteel butter knife to cut through it. Most importantly, she proved the effectiveness of straight-talking progressivism in swaying minds.

I saw that in the letters and e-mails I got from readers after we began publishing Ivins’ work regularly. More than any other columnist, her visceral-but-humorous style moved readers. She gave voice to people outside of the Beltway and blue-state havens, who, especially in the wake of 9/11, needed encouragement to stand firm in their convictions against abuses of power in Washington. In recent years, she was unapologetically against the war in Iraq, against the PATRIOT Act, against the unethical shenanigans of congressional Republicans and against the timidity of Democrats who rolled over and allowed Republicans to get away with stealing our democracy. She was not a columnist who told us which way the wind was blowing. She was determined, with all of the breath that she could muster, to change the direction of the wind, and to get us to join her.

Roger Hickey, the co-director of Campaign for America’s Future , is among the many progressive leaders who knew Ivins personally and was inspired by her.

Molly Ivins loved this country and her native Texas, and she just had to report on the many stupid and dangerous things that those in power tried to do in our name. Plus, her reporting and colorful commentary was devastatingly funny. 
 
Molly wrote for a lot of publications—many of them "progressive," but her audience was always regular Americans and Texans. I remember she was amazed when then-governor of California Pete Wilson tried to scapegoat immigrants and cut their benefits. She noted that her fellow Texans could sometimes be accused of discriminating against Mexican immigrants, but few of them were dumb enough to blame Mexicans for a bad economy in Texas. 
 
We at CAF were honored that she came to D.C. in 2002 to be master of ceremonies of our Take Back America Awards dinner. That year we honored the national Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and an Enron employee who had been ripped off and laid off in that Texas-based corporate scandal and was organizing his fellow workers. Molly knew them both and both were delighted to be introduced by her.  

John Nichols of The Nation offers one of the most telling insights about Ivins’ live in a tribute published today. 

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 Molly Ivins that I can’t square with the news of her death was a sparkling diamond of a woman, ready with the quick laugh, who would never let the bastards get her down,” says Robert Scheer in Truthdig . “That went for the good old boys in her beloved Texas, the state of the president they sent to Washington—and even for the cancer cells that long had been attempting to end her life.”

"It is hard to imagine a better human being. Passion, intelligence, sass, kindness, compassion, wit, talent--she was a walking gift,” says The Nation Washington editor and TomPaine.com contributor David Corn. “The world was such a better place with her around. It was a blessing to be her friend and colleague.”

Even as she was struggling with the ravages of cancer, Ivins was challenging Republicans and Democrats—and the rest of us. Her last column , released by Creators Syndicate on January 11, was a vigorous call to arms against the Iraq war. It was typical Molly:

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that we simply cannot let it continue.

She goes on to write, “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And 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.”

That last sentence in particular hits home with me particularly hard. We live in a truly Orwellian world, where the preposterous and abominable are being sold to us as being for our patriotic good. There is no higher calling in journalism, or in life, than telling it like it is, plainly and without fear, on behalf of the people. That was Molly Ivins’ gift to us, and the spirit that we must keep alive.