Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

Last week Molly checked into the hospital. There the doctors found out there wasn't a damned thing they could do for her. Cancer's like that, once it manages to get out and spread around your body about all the doctors can do is give you chemotherapy to slow it down and hope it goes away on its own. Molly hit that point around this time last year. But the cancer didn't stop. And when that happens, it just eats you up until things stop working, and there's nothing the doctors can do to make'em start working again. So Monday she went home to die in her own bed.

And so she did.

Molly wasn't born in Texas, but she spent most of her early years there and became as Texan as any woman I ever saw. She was a take no prisoners no bullshit funny as hell by-god Texas woman with a heart as big as her adoptive state and a wit to match. She had a turn of the phrase every bit as funny as the late Lewis Grizzard, but where Grizzard was exploring the inner life of Americana, Molly headed straight for the big circus that was politics, especially Texas politics.

Molly once explained that she'd once wanted to write fiction, but after covering the Texas Legislature for the Texas Observer, she couldn't figure out anything more outrageous that anybody would ever believe. So she went into political reporting instead. Whatever the reason, after a stint at the New York Times that ended disasterously when she described a communal chicken roast as a gang pluck, she headed back to her adoptive state and never left again.

If life was fair, Molly would have been with us for another twenty years, and would have been no doubt tartly skewering another self-important politician from her rocking chair at the nursing home two weeks before she died just as she did two weeks ago. That was not, alas, to be. So while the Freepers celebrate that a woman who had more balls than all the Freepi combined has died (hey fuck-heads, why aren't you in Iraq?), I think I'll head out and go grab a beer. Somehow, that seems a helluva lot more fitting than anything else I can do to celebrate a woman who was a Texas original and a damned fine by-god American the way they ain't making many of nowdays in today's world of ball-less Freepi and an American public cowering in fear of some dumbass hiding in a cave in Afghanistan.

Or as the fine folks at Editor and Publisher put it, Molly would have said "Hang in there, keep fightin' for freedom, raise more hell, and don't forget to laugh, too." Sounds like a damned fine idea to me.

-- Badtux the Remembering Penguin