She told you so
By Hal Crowther
"A populist is someone who is for the people and against the powerful, and so a populist is generally the same as a liberal—except we tend to have more fun." —Molly Ivins (1944-2007)Many states, including my home state of North Carolina, maintain Halls of Fame for journalists. I know Texas has one, because it recently inducted my friend Sarah Greene, longtime editor and publisher of the Gilmer Mirror. Turbulent, incorrigible Texas has long been a proving ground for journalists of distinction. In the second half of the 20th century, none were more important than Bill Moyers, a native of Marshall, a few Texas miles across the county line from Gilmer, and my old Columbia classmate Molly Ivins, born in Houston but seasoned in Austin and Dallas/ Fort Worth. Ivins died of cancer in 2007, at the peak of her personal renown but not before the succession of economic, cultural and technological shock waves that threaten her profession with extinction. In November 2006, Molly herself gave a speech in Austin titled "The future of journalism, slow death or suicide?"
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The same week, CBS Vice President Paul Friedman, the most powerful news executive to emerge from our class of 1967 at Columbia, acknowledged publicly that paying for interviews, in many cases with fulsome tabloid creatures like the White House gate-crashers, is now common practice for network news shows. "It's out of the bottle," he admitted sadly.
Ivins would have written scathing, contemptuous columns if these news items had appeared on her watch. But stories that shocked most of us three years ago shock no one today. And along with these latest versions of journalism's pay-to-play scandals, Molly herself is a news item this winter, perhaps for the last time. In the age of new media there's a rapid turnover, even for legends. Reporters and columnists have never attracted many biographers—a great blessing, as most of them would see it—and in their clouded future they seem unlikely to attract many more. Yet there under my Christmas tree, hot off the presses, was Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life, a biography authored by another pair of Texans, Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith.
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The irrepressible Ivins was a force of nature: of all the women I've known, maybe the one least in need of chivalrous gentlemen to protect her and take her part. But the dead, you know, are scandalously defenseless. Their survivors can't even sue for defamation. The authors' intention, in this case, was to perpetuate a legend. Molly was—she consciously became—a great character. God, to her, was a large, unreliable friend named Fred. There's no doubt that the obstreperous cowgirl image she perfected was a tremendous asset in comically sexist Texas, as well as in the national media where there was no one remotely like her. Quite possibly there were tragic, or at least very painful, subtexts in her private life. Yet in spite of her extended, agonizing illness and death, her life was not a soap opera, not a tearjerker, not a case study of a strong woman's losing her battle with the bottle. If this book were a novel, it would be Under the Volcano. This is a serious error of emphasis. Seventeen and a half million Americans abuse alcohol. Only one could write like Molly Ivins.
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"Americans are not getting screwed by the Republican Party," Ivins wrote in one of her very last columns. "They're getting screwed by the large corporations that bought and own the Republican Party."
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Even populism, Molly Ivins' religion, has been co-opted by reactionaries. Instead of distrusting big concentrations of money, tea-party populists distrust big concentrations of intellect and education (this according to conservative columnist David Brooks), all the while marching in unacknowledged lockstep with the corporate agenda. A major political party is represented on national television by an unindicted cutthroat like Karl Rove or a nugatory nitwit like Sarah Palin, and no one blinks. (With my own eyes I've seen a sleeveless, gormless primate identified as Larry the Cable Guy critique Nancy Pelosi on Fox News, in prime time.) With education losing ground at every level, as liberals and conservatives generally agree, and information inseparable from entertainment, it can't be long before the money changers fool most of the people most of the time.
Ivins, always entertaining, was once an effective antidote to the Great Dumbing Down. I don't see anyone filling the big old boots she left behind. She stood tall for the people, even if most of the people she stood for barely noticed.
URL for this story: http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A409901
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