1/31/2007
Why I'll Miss Molly Ivins
I don't really want to do one of those tributes that involves stealing all her best zingers and parroting them back out of context. If I'd written when Ann Richards died, that probably would've been my tack, because I admired Ann, but she didn't mean that much to me personally.

Molly's different. I met her a few times at her Final Friday parties for the lefty Austin set, but I'd be lying if I bragged about being a Friend of Molly. I didn't know her; she wouldn't have recognized me five minutes after we'd been introduced. Unless she had a sharp memory for babbling fanboys, that is.

I first read Molly as an insolent and self-consciously political teenager. I'd moved to Dallas from Canada a few years before, and still struggled to reconcile my liberal upbringing with the racist, gay-bashing, football-obsessed attitudes around me. I sneered a lot. I wrote incendiary columns about drug testing and abortion in my high school newspaper. I baited what Andrew Sullivan's now calling the Christianists. I tried really hard to like Rage Against the Machine.

Despite all this, the world did not reform itself to suit me. I had absolutely no sense of humour about this, but since when do teenagers have a sense of humour about anything? A martyr in my own mind. When I graduated from high school, I went back to Canada just as soon as I could manage, and quickly realized that as much as Texas pissed me off, I'd left part of my identity behind. It's disconcerting to define yourself in terms of your political views, and then find yourself in a place where damn near everyone agrees with you.

I moved back to Texas after two years, chasing a girlfriend who didn't stay a girlfriend for very long. I'm not sure I would have managed to reacclimate if I hadn't discovered Molly. Here was someone, a longtime Texan and an unapologetic liberal. And who, somehow, had managed to maintain her sense of humour in a state where politicians win election by gay-bashing and out-Jesusing their opponents. Texas liberal humour is gallows humour. I'm not sure if this is a Molly story or not, but it's stuck with me for years, and it illustrates the point:
The good people at the Texas Observer, an Austin-based lefty magazine that Molly once edited, decided to hold a contest. Staffers would start out driving in East Texas with bumper stickers reading, "I'm the fag that Ann [Richards] sent to take your guns away." First one back to Austin alive was the winner.
That's a horrifying joke on a lot of levels. But after I started reading Molly, I understood why it was funny. I worked with the ACLU of Texas for a couple of years doing media and legal clerking work, and you had to be able to laugh at stuff like that to survive emotionally. For every victory we savoured, there were dozens of awful things we could do nothing about, either because we didn't have the resources to fight them, or because the good people of Texas had decided that, being a whole 'nother country, certain parts of the Constitution didn't really apply. Including the really important parts.

Molly embodied the fighting spirit of those stubborn Texas liberals who went into every fight knowing they were outgunned, and damn near expecting to have their asses handed to them. People who suffered defeat without bitterness, and dared to think tomorrow might be different. People who may have lost their greatest wit, but never their unsinkable sense of humour.

Thank you, Molly. For taking justice seriously, and life not at all.

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# by Chris @ 5:42 PM
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