Molly Ivins did say that
And she correctly predicted that Texas-style politics would become America's politics
Greetings,
Y’all sick and tired yet of the endless stream of egotistical dumb stuff you force yourself to listen to every day of your one precious life by not turning off the television with it’s 24/7 poisonous stream of “information” or the Sirius talk channel that is well-produced but is seriously creepy the way it feels like whoever is talking is laying on the pillow next to you?
I was so bone weary by Friday from having written not one but two 4,000 word pieces in one week for my local audience, breaking a news story that one local politician turned into something it wasn’t, and visiting the doctor five times across three cities, and that included a trip to to the ER for a mysteriously swollen leg.
I felt like I was out of my body by the time I had my eyes dilated for a vision test Friday morning so much so that by the time I got home, I could not bear sound. No sound. Somehow my phone at some point played a commercial that had slipped through on a Youtube channel I’d not even known was open and I thought the whole of my skin would break open and the inner workings of my nervous system would tumble out in a coiled and tangled heap.
But after a nap, I was ready for low-volume mindless television and found this documentary of Molly Ivins:
It was so good, that today, with yesterday in between, I watched it again. I could watch it yet a third time tomorrow.
Nothing mindless at all about this documentary. In fact, all of yesterday, I didn’t let slip into my world a single peep out of any other journalist, wanna be journalist, or just anybody because I still had to have the quiet or face some kind of breakdown, I was so thoroughly exhausted from my recently acquired second full-time job of being an auto-immune diseases patient who sees doctors every day. But I kept thinking about the documentary.
I miss Molly Ivins so much and part of the reason I watched it twice was just so I could hear her one liners and her logic again. When she was alive, I read damn near every one of her columns every week for years. It was her and Peggy Noonan that I read, so that I could have broccoli with my steak. I loved each in equal measure, and I wanted to be both of them, but I didn’t realize how much Ivins suffered from self loathing until I watched this documentary.
Apparently, it was released in 2019. I was going through one of the most depressing periods of my life by then, and the television in my home was always on, but I wasn’t the one watching it. I needed to always hide from the noise of it. The last thing I was going to do was turn on some streaming service or other while I was in desperate need of refuge from talking heads. So, I missed this when it was first released.
It’s on Netflix now. I so hope you watch it.
That she had a serious dependency on alcohol makes a lot of sense now that I look back and think of how awful Ivins looked most of the time. And because she was 6 feet tall by the time she was 12 years old and was much brainier than her shorter sister, she was dubbed the smart one and her sister was the pretty one, and really seems to have taken that to heart and did not believe her gorgeous, Jackie-O statuesque self, only even more attractive and I reckon heaps smarter, was good for much other than snarky, penetrating commentary.
With an oil company executive father who demanded fealty and utter compliance with his conservative ways, liberal thinking Molly really started hating herself early, and it never stopped. She died of aggressive breast cancer in 2007 at age 62. She drank excessively almost until the day she succumbed.
But for God’s sake she was so insightful and understood how vapid most Progressives of her day were (they still are) while yet the Texas Bubbas, as she called them, were as ignorant as the Progressives were empty-headed, and she said so.
I think it was her first book that was titled, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” which now is so prescient a title, because she would have been cancelled a kajillion times over were she alive and writing today. In the documentary, she is shown telling the story to David Letterman about how the title was derived. I have forgotten which Texas politician it was, but she’d written that his IQ was so low that if it were any lower, they’d have to water him twice a day, and people in her home state lost their minds, thus the title.
Of course, I thought her rapier wit with zingers like that was brilliant, but she also really, really understood about freedom. Was I the only person in 2001 who was like, Uh, hang on. This Patriot Act is bullshit? No, I wasn’t. Molly Ivins saw through it, and with far clearer vision than any of her fellow Liberal friends. I honestly don’t remember what Peggy Noonan thought about it. I think by then I had gotten tired of the number of things she would string together with “and” to construct her Dickensian sentences. I still have affection for her though.
She also cowrote with Lou Dubose, a book called, Shrub about George W. Bush, whom she claimed was a hard man not to like despite his anti-intellectualism. I think that is probably right, and who can but feel sorry for what a doormat he turned out to be under Dick Cheney’s evil feet. Ivins knew it was all bullshit and warned that presidency and the foreign policy adventurism was a trial run for how the neocons wanted to run America. And so it was.
If it’s not as good as Molly Ivins, I don’t want the noise in my home.
Have a good week.
Whitney