Still Remembering Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins's memorial service was held Sunday in Austin. With lots of laughter and Marcia Ball singing "Great Balls of Fire," it sounds like an appropriate remembrance. Over the past few days, not surprisingly, a lot of people have been remembering in print, as well.

Maya Angelou related the first time they met. She'd been asked at the last minute to introduce Molly at a political function.

I spoke glowingly about Ms. Ivins for a few minutes, then, suddenly, a six-foot-tall, red-haired woman sprang from the wings. She strode onto the stage and over to the microphone. She gave me an enveloping hug and said, in that languorous Texas accent, "Maya Angelou and I are identical twins, we were separated at birth."

I am also six feet tall, but I am not white. She was under 50 when she made the statement, and I was in my middle 60s, but our hearts do beat in the same rhythm. Whoever separated us at birth must know it did not work. We have been in the struggle for equal rights for all people since we met on that Waldorf Astoria stage. We have laughed together without apology and we have wept when weeping was necessary.

E.J. Dionne was another to extol her virtues:

Boy, will we miss Molly Ivins, the writer and happy agitator who succumbed Wednesday to cancer -- a disease, she said, not sparing herself from her own lashing wit, that "can kill you, but it doesn't make you a better person." Yes, we will remember her for being raucously funny, always at the expense of the wealthy, the powerful or the Texas legislature.

But because she made you laugh and broke all the rules of polite commentary ("I believe in practicing prudence at least once every two or three years"), Molly made you forget how deadly serious she was about politics, democracy and social justice.

More than just about any other columnist I can think of, Molly was a genuine populist, to make proper reference to a word she couldn't stand to see misused by charlatans. She believed in lifting up the underdog and hated it when the wealthy made excuses for injustice.

Joe Conason got into the act, as well, noticing an intriguing detail in the days after Molly's death:

Even her favorite goat, the president of the United States, understood that he must pay tribute to the tough Texas wiseass who saw right through "Dubya" and the political culture that produced him. I bet that would have made her chuckle.

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What distinguished Molly from the few who might be considered her peers today were her indefatigable liberalism and her unfashionable idealism. Most political columnists, especially when they achieve her level of mainstream success, with syndication in more than 300 newspapers, tend to cultivate a certain emotional distance from such passions. They definitely prefer not to be tagged as liberal, perhaps because most newspapers continue to be controlled by conservative Republicans.

But she didn't pretend not to care, and she didn't pretend to be a centrist or an aloof observer. She despised pretension and pomposity of all kinds. (Indeed, she was as likely to make fun of herself as anybody else.) Just as she wouldn't dull down her prose to satisfy censorious editors, she saw no reason to soften her opposition to prejudice, poverty and war so she would seem more moderate.

In The New York Times, Paul Krugman talked a bit about her but collected a handful of quotes featuring Molly on the Iraq War. Thanks to the generosity of Wealthy Frenchman, we can enjoy it outside of the Times subscription blackout.

Speaking of The New York Times, in Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell recounts the beginning of the end of Molly's tenure at the paper of record, all of which revolved around the phrase "gang pluck." And even a generation and a half later, they could do no more than allude to that phrase in their own obituary. It's a great, if unfortunate, story.