Remembering Molly Ivins

(NOTE: It’s been 15 years since I wrote this. Molly had just passed.)

It's time to say goodbye to a great journalist, gone too soon. Today, it was Molly Ivins, dead of breast cancer at 62. She will get many well-deserved eulogies. I can only add my few personal memories. 

She was in town on the speaking circuit one night in the early '90s when Doug Foster, our mutual friend, invited us to hang out at a downtown bar for a late-night drinking session. We were both at our best, which is to say our worst, so the jokes were flying back and forth as waiters shuttled bottles of her favorite spirits. Night turned into the next day.

She was most definitely a woman who could drink me under the table. 

Molly's caustic humor not only was contagious, she could be inspirational to progressive audiences. Her story telling was legendary. She gave no ground to those politicians who asserted claim over her Texas. If Bush thought he represented the true Texan, Molly begged to disagree.

She dismissed him as "Shrub."

Molly was the keynote speaker at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Investigative Reporting, in 2002. She personally introduced the three of us who had co-founded CIR back in 1977. Her speech was an old-time, shit-kicking, raucously profane political screed.

Tonight as I watched a fuzzy video of that event, I was struck by Molly's deeply personal identification with what we at CIR had always tried to do.

"Progressives are thought of as terminally earnest...(but) if we couldn't laugh, we'd go insane." Molly joked her way through the event that night, some lines delivered so fast in her droll Texas drawl that the audience had trouble keeping up with her.

Laughter erupted again and again. She was skewering the mainstream press, politicians, and anyone else within range.

But she also was cognizant that young journalists were present, idealistic and fresh-faced. For them, she was momentarily earnest: "Yes, you can make a difference." But, then, she added, "The best way you can learn [to become a good reporter] is to listen to older journalists sitting around in bars..." 

Finally, she turned on herself: "You know, I've spent my whole life being obnoxiously cheerful." An unabashed optimist. That's who Molly Ivins really was. 

We need more like her. Let's hope some of the journalists from the next generation were listening.

***
I remember one other, quite different time.

Molly was promoting another book in 1998 and was on her book tour. By now, she was extremely well known, and audiences everywhere looked forward to her visits.

But on this particular day, she was sitting in the waiting room of a web-based magazine, waiting for an editor to get out of a meeting and see her. The receptionist was young and didn't know who she was. The staff milling around also was clueless. As I saw her across the lobby, Molly seemed very alone, awkwardly thumbing through a magazine, probably wondering why she was even there that day.

I went over and renewed our acquaintance. I sat with her until her appointment. She seemed grateful for the connection.

I know I was. 

Good-bye, Molly. The next world just became a much funnier, more irreverent place. Even as ours became one giant heartbeat less so.

NEWSLINKS:

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• Putin Says ‘Mass Strike’ on Ukraine Is Revenge for Bridge Attack (NYT)

• Belarus's Lukashenko warns Ukraine, deploys troops with Russia (Reuters)

• VIDEO: Russian Missile Strikes Hit Residential Areas in Zaporizhzhia (AP)

• Russian strikes raise pressure on allies to send advanced air defense (WP)

• Why Little-Noticed State Legislative Races Could Be Hugely Consequential (NYT)

• Spread of Catholic hospitals limits reproductive care across the U.S. (WP)

• Following the Supreme Court's reversal of its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, doctors have emerged as some of the loudest voices for protecting abortion rights, particularly in swing states where November’s vote will determine the landscape for reproductive health care in the years to come. HuffPost's Liz Skalka interviewed more than a dozen doctors who expressed worries about the current political climate, which potentially impacts everything from contraception access to the skills that medical schools can teach students. [HuffPost]

• Gavin Newsom makes another unorthodox play on abortion (Politico)

• Kevin McCarthy claimed Trump had no idea his supporters carried out Capitol attack (Guardian)

• Shaped by gun violence and climate change, Gen Z weighs whether to vote (WP)

• Scientists Can No Longer Ignore Ancient Flooding Tales — Indigenous stories from the end of the last Ice Age could be more than myth. (Atlantic)

• Under the Taliban, Afghanistan’s Madrassas Increase and Harbor Terrorists (FO)

• The Afghanistan Debacle Summed Up: We Suck at Nation Building (DB)

• What Afghans Want the Rest of the World to Know — The country is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman. (Atlantic)

• More than 180 dead as protests grip Iran (Reuters)

• A lack of rain and snow in central California and restricted water supplies from the Colorado River in the southernmost part of the state have withered summer crops like tomatoes and onions and threatened leafy greens grown in the winter. That has added pressure to grocery prices, putting a squeeze on wallets with no end in sight. (Reuters)

• United Methodists are breaking up in a slow-motion schism (AP)

• Artificial intelligence could soon diagnose illness based on the sound of your voice (NPR)

• How climate change is driving monkeys and lemurs from trees to the ground (WP)

• Ancient DNA From 1 Million Years Ago Discovered in Antarctica (ScienceAlert)

• We’ve never seen Warriors’ Draymond Green this humbled and contrite. Will it matter? (SFC)

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• Nation’s Indigenous People Confirm They Don’t Need Special Holiday, Just Large Swaths Of Land Returned Immediately (The Onion)