In Memoriam: Molly Ivins

By Joan Opyr, 2-02-07

I’m often asked where I learned to write like I write.  How did I come to trust my own voice and my own sense of right and wrong?  Or, if the questioner is a critic, how did I get to be so damned ornery?  Why am I so mean, so unforgiving, so sharp-tongued and, God help me, so unfeminine?

The answer is simple.  My late grandfather, Charles Randolph Watkins, taught me to trust myself.  He taught me that I shouldn’t be afraid to speak my mind, to be brutally honest, and to damn the consequences.  “There’s nothing I hate more than a goddamned chickenshit,” he’d say.  “So don’t be a goddamned chickenshit.” My grandfather also let me wear his shiny cordovan Florsheim Imperial wing-tips to high school, so I think that answers the unfeminine question as well.  But where did I learn to write?  Molly Ivins taught me. 

When I first began reading her columns, she wrote primarily about the Texas Legislature.  I was bemused to find myself so entertained by the doings of political idiots in another state.  Hell, I didn’t need to go to Texas for that kind of entertainment; I lived in North Carolina.  We had the king of all homegrown assholes, Senator Jesse Helms, AKA Senator No, a beady-eyed bigot straight out of Jim Crow who’d begun his meteoric political rise with a doctored photograph showing the white wife of an opponent supposedly dancing with a black man.  With political fodder like Jesse Helms, who needed Texas?  And yet I kept on reading.  Molly Ivins was compelling, she was trenchant, but most of all, she was laugh out loud funny.  Until I read Molly Ivins, I didn’t know you could write that way about politics.  I didn’t know you could write that way about anything. 

Molly Ivins wasn’t my only teacher.  I also learned from Flannery O’Connor, from Florence King, from Erma Bombeck and Margaret Halsey.  I had a lot of good teachers, but I can still remember reading Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? back in 1991 and thinking, “That’s who I want to be when I grow up!” But there was only one Molly Ivins, just as there was only one Mother Jones, only one Barbara Jordan, and only one Tom Lehrer.  (That sad imitator, Mark Russell, just doesn’t cut it.  The next time he steps up to the piano, I hope someone has rigged dynamite to Middle C.)

It took me awhile to figure it out, but the lesson of Molly Ivins wasn’t to imitate her; it was to be myself, to speak out in my own voice, and to call it like I see it.  If I cared what people thought of me, then I was doing it all wrong.  A policeman friend once told me that when his officers came to him and complained about feeling unappreciated, he said, “If you wanted people to love you, then you should have been a fireman.” If you want people to love you, then don’t be a political columnist.  Don’t be a humor columnist.  Don’t be yourself.  Crouch down, pucker up, and prepare to kiss a lot of ass.  That’s the way to fame and fortune—don’t tell the truth, tell people what they want to hear.  Pretend you’re Condoleezza Rice.  Molly Ivins kissed no one’s ass.  She had no sacred cows.  She had a gift for spotting the clay feet on all our false idols, and she stomped them to pieces with her cowboy boots.

She wrote brilliant and compelling pieces about national issues, about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and, in her last column and with her last breath, she exhorted us to rise up against this corrupt, isolated, and rogue administration.  We must say no to the Iraq War.  We must say no to troop escalation.  She reminded us that we have a moral obligation to fight the good fight—to deny those whom Ivins called “the Bushies” their delusions of adequacy. 

In his tribute to Molly Ivins, her friend and editor Anthony Zurcher quotes her trenchant observation that “Politics is not a picture on the wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don’t much care for.” Politics is important; politics is life and death.  Often, what passes for representative democracy in this country is enough to make you cry, but how much better to join Molly Ivins in a good laugh at the expense of the pompous and then get on with the business of trying to make the world better.  Laughter and a keen sense of the ludicrous were her greatest weapons.  She had this to say about the different kinds of humor:

“One kind . . . 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.”

Molly Ivins used her prodigious satirical talent wisely.  She took aim at the rich and the powerful, and she never missed.  She also never forgot where she came from.  Her writing about Texas remained just as interesting to this non-Texan as her writing about people and events that were closer to my home.  She was often at her best when two worlds collided, the local and the state, or the state and the federal.  When Bill Clinton was fixing to take office in January 1993, Molly Ivins wrote a column called “The New World Disorder” for The Progressive.  It began:

“The nice thing about the Transition Period is that it gives Democrats something to gossip about.  Take the situation here in Texas, where Bill Clinton picked off our senior senator, Lloyd Bentsen, and then picked off his obvious replacement, Henry Cisneros, leaving the field wide open for two generations of Texas Democrats to have a destruction derby.

Our poor governor, Ann Richards, is faced with a list of suggested replacements ranging from Ladybird Johnson to Barbara Jordan to Willie Nelson.  I’m rooting for Dolph Briscoe, a 1970s-era governor and the most boring one we’ve ever had.  In fact, Briscoe was the pet rock of governors, and I think he would be right restful in office.  Never bothers anyone with charisma or ideas.  He was given to appointing dead people to various boards and commissions, and they, too, were restful, caused no trouble at all.”

Only Molly Ivins could have made Dolph Briscoe the star of that paragraph.  No one was better at making us see the big picture in the small details.  Presidential candidates never bother to visit places like Idaho or Montana or Wyoming or Utah—not unless they’re fishing or skiing.  Molly Ivins reminded us of why we’re important, why we matter, and the part we can and must play in the great scheme of things.  She was and is an inspiration and a challenge, and in death, she’s still teaching me how to write.

God bless her and keep her.  I’ll sure as hell miss her.