RIP Molly Ivins

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

It will be a glum evening around chez writing irish tonight. I knew she had cancer, but for some reason, I irrationally thought she'd pull through.

I don't feel good.

 

I have looked for a link and never found it, but it's in her first book.

 

One of my faves:


Impolitic, by Molly Ivins.

I Am the Cosmos

Austin, Texas --- ``So write about Camille Paglia,'' suggested the
editor. Like any normal person, I replied, ``And who the hell might
she be?''

Big cheese in New York intellectual circles. The latest rage. Hot
stuff. Controversial.

But I'm not good on New York intellectual controversies, I explained.
Could never bring myself to give a rat's ass about Jerzy Kosinski.
Never read Andy Warhol's diaries. Can never remember the name of the
editor of this _New Whatsit_, the neo-con critical rag. I'm a no-hoper
on this stuff, practically a professional provincial.

Read Paglia, says he, you'll have an opinion. So I did; and I do.

Christ! Get this woman a Valium!

Hand her a gin. Try meditation. Camille, honey, calm down!

The noise is about her _oeuvre_, as we always say in Lubbock: _Sexual
Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson_. In
very brief, for those of you who have been playing hooky from the _New
York Review of Books_, Ms. Paglia's contention is that ``the history
of western civilization has been a constant struggle between ... two
impulses, an unending tennis match between cold, Apollonian
categorization and Dionysian lust and chaos.'' Jeez, me too. I always
thought the world was divided into only two kinds of people --- those
who think the world is divided into only two kinds of people, and
those who don't.

You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work
and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization,
easy to make fun of? _Au contraire_, as we always say in Amarillo; the
sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists
of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.

Never one to dodge a simple dichotomy when she can set one up, Ms.
Paglia holds that the entire error of western civilization stems from
denying that nature is a kind of nasty, funky, violent, wet dream, and
that Judeo-Christianity has been one long effort to ignore this. She
pegs poor old Rousseau, that fathead, as the initiator of the silly
notion that nature is benign and glorious and that only civilization
corrupts.

Right away, I got a problem. Happens I have spent a lot of my life in
the wilderness, and also a lot of my life in bars. When I want sex and
violence, I go to a Texas honky-tonk. When I want peace and quiet, I
head for the woods. Just as a minor historical correction to Ms.
Paglia, Rousseau did not invent the concept of benign Nature. Among
the first writers to hold that nature was a more salubrious
environment fro man than the corruptions of civilization were the
Roman Stoics --- rather a clear-eyed lot, I always thought.

Now why, you naturally ask, would anyone care about whether a reviewer
has ever done any serious camping? Ah, but you do not yet know the
Camille Paglia school of I-am-the-cosmos argument. Ms. Paglia believes
that all her personal experiences are Seminal. Indeed, Definitive.
She credits a large part of her supposed wisdom to having been born
post-World War II and thus having been raised on television. Damn me,
so was I.

In addition to the intrinsic cultural superiority Ms. Paglia
attributes to herself from having grown up watching television (``It's
Howdy-Doody Time'' obviously made us all smarter), she also considers
her own taste in music to be of enormous significance. ``From the
moment the feminist movement was born, it descended into dogma,'' she
told an interviewer for _New York_ magazine. ``They stifled any kind
of debate, any kind of dissent. Okay, it's Yale, it's New Haven in
'69, I am a rock fanatic, okay .... So I was talking about taste to
these female rock musicians, and I said the Rolling Stones were the
greatest rock band, and that just set them off. They said, `The
Rolling Stones are sexist, and it's bad music because it's sexist.' I
said: `Wait a minute. You can't make a judgements about art on the
basis of whether it fits into some dogma.' And now they're yelling,
screaming, saying that nothing that demeans women can be art.

 

Damn, FB. I envy you. This was one of the people in this biz I really wanted to meet.

An incredible, gifted writer and social commentator whose books grace my shelves. Didn't agree with everything she wrote (especially on immigration), but on 97% of the subjects, she was dead-on nails.

Her line about Pat Buchanan's speech at the '92 RNC -- "It probably sounded better in the original German" -- remains one of my favorite written lines ever.

R.I.P. Molly. You done well on this plane. Very well. :'(

 

I fixed it to the shotglass sarcasm approach. I can't keep up.

 

Here's the link to the whole Paglia piece:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/misc/ivins_on_paglia

 

Thanks for the link, Fenian. That at least made me crack a smile.

God, the early 90s were so full of shit intellectually. Both the academic left and the academic right managed to hit near-all-time lows simultaneously. I still shudder when I think of being in grad school during that time.

 

A very funny writer. She will be missed. RIP.

 

I agree. RIP.

 

Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn.

I hope she and McKenzie find each other real fast.

:'(

 

This makes me pretty damn sad. I didn't know her personally, but I felt like I did after reading her columns for years. Unlike some people who shall remain nameless, Molly was a true Texan, and loved her state both because of, and in spite of, all its warts. My favorite story about her clashing with the stuffy NYT copy desk is the one that actually led to her departure there. She went to a New Mexico community chicken festival and tried to refer to it as a "Gang pluck." (Didn't make it in, and she quit.) She said her idea of hell was being edited by the Times copy desk for all of eternity. When she became a columnist, she understood what so few people do: That debate and criticism is good for democracy. None of this "emboldens the terrorists" bullshit. We're a unique and admirable country BECAUSE we can rip those in power without fear of reprisal. And she did her share of ripping, always with wit and style.

What makes me almost as sad is that she was real person, not a corporate drone unwilling to offend, and every year this business bleeds more and more of those people. Six years ago, when I first started working at the paper I do now, there were scores of fascinating characters in the newsroom, and many of them were amazing reporters and writers who weren't Ivy League grads or the products of some box cutter journalism school. They were characters, but they possessed a huge amount of institutional knowledge, they knew their communities, and they could relate to working class people because their parents had been working class people. Like Molly, they listend to the little guy and little gal, and told their stories in a way that wasn't like, "Golly gee, look at the redneck yokels play with their toys."

And one by one, the were driven from the paper, and now there are very few left. In their place are people who make phone calls much of the day, read Poynter, and shop on Amazon.

RIP, Molly.

You'd be embarrassed by how much some people are going to miss you, but dammit, I'm going to do it anyway.

 

She could be funny and smart at the same time, and leave you laughing, smarter, feeling stupid and about to cry.