R.I.P. Molly Ivins
According to The New Yorker of 10/31/1994, Ivins made a promise to her mentor, John Henry Faulk: “I don’t want you to worry about the First Amendment. I’m gonna take care of it.”
As Lawrence Wright observed, “Ivins finds that humor is the best weapon in the war against intolerance.” And for decades she’s been at the forefront of that battle, a forceful voice for a set of values too rarely represented in the media.
The Texas Observer has a great remembrance of her life and work. All we can do is take on the charge she accepted those many years ago, and take the same care for the First Amendment that she did.
A biologist and statistician by day, battling pseudoscience and raising a family by night.
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Despite my ambivolence about concepts of the afterlife (I’m a lapsed agnostic; I’m not sure what it is I don’t believe in), I still entertain a fantasy that when we die we somehow learn all the answers that escaped us in life.
We’ll know where Jimmy Hoffa’s buried. Who killed JFK. The appeal of “For Better or For Worse” on the funny pages. And, if pressed, St. Peter will explain to us how George WMD Bush’s presidency somehow fits into God’s
eternal plan. That last question is what I’m counting on since I’m sure the logic will take billions of years to explain until I’m cast into the Lake of Fire.
Or maybe it’s not like the cartoonish Pearly Gates. Maybe, just perhaps, at that moment we shed this mortal coil, all the secrets of this life will come into focus.
If that’s the case, tonight Molly Ivins knows.
She’ll learn the facts behind Divine Intervention…like when Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand tied for the Best Actress Oscar, or when the Mets won the ’69 World Series, or how the creme filling gets inside Hostess
Cupcakes.
But, knowing Molly, she’ll ask tougher questions: About George HW Bush’s participation in the guns-for-hostages-for-cocaine Iran/Contra deal. About Shrub’s real activites during his National Guard years. About Halliburton (nee, Kellogg-Root) and its manipulation of government (and
extra-government) policies to bestow power and fortune to those so greedy to sell out any and every American ideal.
Molly will finally get that interview Ken Lay escaped. (They belong to eternity now, he can’t hold out forever).
She’ll sip bourbon and branch water with Mencken and Twain and they’ll laugh and cry about all they knew but no one believed back in the days when they were able to express some logic and common sense to the people they lived with. Molly will introduce H.L. and Mark to fellow Texans Ann Richards and Barbara Jordan and there will be more laughs and wisdom than any has ever experienced.
And, I suspect, Molly won’t be surprised in the least.
Because Molly Ivins knew.
And she reported what she knew.
And she knew what she knew would be rejected by the
sheeple-corporate-conservative-Republican-moron coalition who run the world she lived in.
And they hated her.
But tonight Molly knows she was right all along.
I thought of Molly as my sister. I hope she is having a ball in heaven, if there is one. Only problem with being in heaven would be that she wouldn’t get to interview the folks who provided most of her fodder: the cheaters, the liars, the hypocrites and fools.
Molly, God loves you (if He exists, and I trust if He does, you’ll let us know).