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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Ivins' approach can be summed up in a comment Twain made in his autobiography, "Mark Twain in Eruption": "I have always preached. If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited, I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor."
Hundreds of Ivins' pieces illustrate this process, but here's an example from one column, written in '91 for the Times Herald and reprinted in "Nothin' but Good Times Ahead." She starts out by saying, "Phil Gramm is about to appoint fourteen new federal judges in the state of Texas. As they say in the comics, 'AIEEEEEEE!'" Funny, but then she goes on to tell the story of a Dallas judge named Joe Fish.
Fish sentenced "socialite Carol Peeler to one thousand hours of community service because of her splendid record with the Junior League. Ms. Peeler, you may recall, was accused of tax fraud that cost the U.S. Treasury $750 million."
Then further down: "But, my friends, there is always another side to the story, and lest you think Judge Fish is unduly lenient on white-collar crime, let me point out what happens in his court to those who are not rich, white, and socially prominent. Regard, if you will, the fate of Shirley Harris ... not in the Junior League, and an Okie on top of it.
"Harris ... was indicted for conspiracy, wire fraud, and mail fraud in connection with ... a Dallas-based franchising business. Raphael Cosmetics accepted franchise fees averaging $8,400 from at least forty folks around the country and then didn't make good on its promise to turn the franchises into lucrative small businesses. Shirley Harris, a Piedmont, Oklahoma, housewife, opened the Dallas office and answered the phones there during the short life of Raphael Cosmetics.
"She told the judge she had not known what her husband and her brother was doing was criminal and that she was afraid of her abusive husband. Judge Fish, proving to us all how tough he is on crime, gave Shirley Harris a sixty-year prison sentence."
Then Ivins finishes the column: Harris "should have tried harder to get into the Junior League. And probably would have, if she hadn't been raped when she was fourteen, forced to bear an illegitimate child at a home for unwed mothers, and then married an abusive man.
"Hey, luck that bad, no wonder she got Joe Fish for a judge.
"Fourteen new Joe Fishes on the bench."
Sometimes, though, Ivins gets so incensed she just can't muster a yuk. Commenting on the so-called partial-birth law that the House of Representatives passed in 1996 -- and President Clinton ultimately vetoed -- outlawing late-term abortions, Ivins wrote: "No one has an abortion at six months unless it means her life, or that she will never recover her health, or that the child will be hopelessly deformed and then die.
"How dare the politicians in the House intrude into a decision like that? What do they know about the complications of pregnancy for those with severe diabetes or any number of other conditions that make such decisions necessary?"
Ivins' career has taken a couple of nasty turns, but she seems to have survived them. In a 1995 article for Mother Jones on Southern manners and mores, she extensively quoted, with affectionate attribution, statements from Florence King's book "Southern Ladies and Gentlemen." But for some careless reason Ivins still fails to comprehend, she left the attribution off a few King statements. In other words, she plagiarized. This, needless to say, is the ultimate no-no for a writer, and has cost many scribes their jobs. But considering the fact that Ivins' guilty passages were mixed in with many other cases that were attributed, her crime did not seem too horrible; she apologized to King and that was the end of it.
More seriously, Ivins was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. She wrote a couple of highly unsentimental columns about it, and now seems to be recovering nicely. She says she has a 75 percent chance of being cancer-free for five years, after which the odds get even better. Of course, she jokes about it:
"One of the things I said was that I had been in great hopes that I would become a better person as a result of confronting my own mortality, but it actually never happened. I didn't become a better person." Then she laughs heartily.
The prospect of losing Molly Ivins to cancer is too much to bear. Leaving the punditry to the likes of George Will and Charles Krauthammer and David Broder would be hard cheese indeed for the news junkie. Because she finds the humanity in what she writes about, and makes us laugh in the process, she elevates a profession that is dominated by mediocrity and received ideas. She is, ultimately, about love -- though she would undoubtedly cringe at the sentiment.
Let's give Ivins' buddy and former Texas Gov. Richards the last word:
"I travel all over the country, and it never fails that whatever group of people I find myself in, the No. 1 question is, 'How is our friend Molly Ivins?' And I mean coast to coast, border to border. She is so revered and beloved, and justifiably so."
