Editorials

As we had feared, Molly Ivins died on Wednesday. The anti-war war columns that we’d requested on Tuesday as a way of carrying on her last campaign have been coming in, and we’ll be printing one in every issue for a while as a tribute to her. We’ve also gotten, unsolicited, a good number of letters just expressing the writer’s appreciation for Molly herself, which we’ll add to our letters pages, some in print and all on the web. The Texas Observer, where she worked for many years and continued raising money for after she moved on, has put together an affecting memorial at texasobserver.org, another good place for readers to send their comments on Molly herself.  

The poetry that students were forced to memorize when Molly and I were in school in the 1950s has an annoying way of popping into one’s mind at moments like this, even though much of it is now out of style. In the context of Molly’s death, I can’t help recalling memorized lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (do kids still read him?): “Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime/ And departing leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time.”  

Deconstructing this message, even though the expression sounds mawkish to twenty-first century ears, can still be worthwhile. The Great Men thing is profoundly annoying to feminists, of course, but let’s ignore that for the moment. And “sublime”? What does that mean in today’s world, where fame is 15 minutes and it’s usually for doing something ugly?  

Let’s just look at Molly’s “footprints on the sands of time,” and remember another quote commonly attributed to Emma Goldman: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.”  

Molly danced her way across the sands of time, jumping for joy and whooping with laughter as she took part in all the serious revolutions of the second half of 20th century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The poor woman hasn’t been dead a week, and already the Internet is circulating marvelous legends about funny things she might or might not have actually said, a sure sign of imminent canonization in the Church of the Left, right up there in the pantheon next to Emma Goldman.  

She gave Serious Journalism a good try, but ultimately rejected it as stultifying. Instead, she revived the use of the American Language, Texas Branch, as a way of telling a story, the whole story, not just a sanitized corporate version of the story told in sanctimonious clean language. The web apocrypha includes many examples, some undoubtedly authentic, of the way the New York Times tried and failed to clean Molly up. And Thursday’s obituaries provided another great one, perhaps intended, perhaps not.  

Here’s the Times obit: “She cut an unusual figure in the Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.”  

And here’s the real deal, sent to the Planet by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post: 

“There’s a heartfelt compliment I always meant to give Molly, but never got around to it: Lady, you’re even more piss than vinegar.  

“I’ve read Molly’s work almost my whole adult life, but I met her only a few times, in 1977, when we walked our dogs together in Lincoln Park in Albany (N.Y.). I was working for the local paper; Mol was working for the New York Times. My dog was named Augie. Her dog was named Shitter. I knew immediately this was a woman to be loved and feared.” 

Amen.  

And one more quote, this one from executed Wobbly Joe Hill, most often remembered in a song widely sung in funereal contexts in the Church of the Left: “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.” 

Here’s Molly’s version of Joe Hill’s last words, one more time: 

“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. 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….We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!” 

As we said Tuesday in this space, we’re asking readers and writers to enlist in Molly’s “old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war.” Please keep those anti-war columns coming until the war is over. The first one, submitted by Betty Medsger, who used to live around here, appears in this issue.