A documentary about "the life and times of Molly Ivins," Texan, female, white, liberal, born 1944, sharp-tongued (but not "shrill"), recipient of innumerable death threats from fellow Texans and a political columnist responsible for such sentences as:
Among that year's crop of Republican freshmen, Sonny Bono qualified as an intellectual giant, and he was killed when he skied into the side of a tree.
That line did not make it into the movie. Here is one that did. In a Q and A after a talk, someone asked her opinion of Newt Gingrich. "Oh," she replied, feigning puzzlement, and then: "Do you speak of the draft-dodging, dope-smoking deadbeat dad who divorced his wife while she was dying?"
Her dad was an oil company executive and a right winger, big shot, big money, an authoritarian and an alcoholic. It would be easy to say that her politics were explained by youthful rebellion that became a kind of long habit, but she herself credited the issue of race, and made the point, which I realize is true though I'd never thought of it, that Texas seems to have been left behind in the civil rights movement: Martin Luther King never went there, Stokely Carmichael never went there, CBS News never went there. It was as racially segregated as South Africa while she was growing up in the 1950s and early 60s, and she detested it.
Of local interest, her second job in journalism, after graduating from Smith in 1965, was the cop beat at the Minneapolis Tribune. The movie has a technique of illustrating the development of her youthful resume with a map of the US on which her travels are lined in, and the move from Houston to Minneapolis placed a star for Minneapolis at the approximate location of Fergus Falls.
Well, even Homer nodded, and she didn’t stay long.
Back in Texas, she reported on the state legislature. She once noted that of the first seven House speakers she covered, five were eventually indicted for criminal offenses, and, of the two that weren't, one was murdered by his wife, so she was indicted, though not convicted—perhaps, Ivins said, because the jury wanted to recognize her service to humanity. When the Texas legislature took up the issue of sodomy, the Republican majority made a point of their high-minded egalitarianism by banning anal intercourse no matter the gender of the participants: husbands and wives were constrained as surely as gay men. The carefully crafted legislation had to use certain words, which Ivins merrily quoted while noting that it might now be problematic for one legislator to shake the hand of another, "since in Texas it is illegal for a prick to touch an asshole."
The title of her first collection of political commentary was "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"
She moved on to The New York Times, also known as "the grey lady." What were they thinking? And what was she thinking? She was assigned to "the Denver bureau." She was the whole bureau and entertained herself by submitting copy that she knew violated her employer's style sheet. In one piece, about the activities of a chicken-raising family on slaughter day, she deployed the phrase "gang pluck" and soon found herself being interviewed by the paper's famed editor, Abe Rosenthal.
Rosenthal: You submitted a story with the phrase "gang pluck."
Ivins: Yes.
Rosenthal: Why did you do that? What does it mean?
Ivins: It's a play on words.
Rosenthal [after a long pause]: You were trying to make readers of our paper think of the expression "gang fuck."
Ivins: Abe, you are a hard man to fool.
I enjoyed these moments, arguably to my discredit, though judging by the reactions in the St Anthony Main Cinema today I'm not the only reprobate. Perhaps the film can be criticized for serving up what her liberal admirers want and are expecting—after all, no one else is going to see it. Nevertheless it isn't hard to detect countervailing themes. In the film's first image, she's at a podium, looking very much like the cancer patient she was. As her story unwinds, you notice in how many images she's holding either a cigarette or a beer, sometimes both, and the mandatory pictures of her at the keyboard often include to the side a beer can or half-empty glass of wine. For almost her entire adult life she was, like her wingnut dad, a high functioning alcoholic. She might have been self-medicating. "I'm a natural liberal," she explained to an interviewer, "fish gotta swim, and my heart bleeds." One of her favorite sayings, another wellspring of her politics, was that "shit flows downhill and people at the bottom are drowning in it." Those who knew her best described her as "shy." Her private life seems to have been more evidence for the maxim concerning how most people lead lives of quiet desperation. She never married. When asked about her love life, she humorously deflected, observing that it would be unethical for her to screw—her word—a colleague, a source, or a subject, and these were the only people she knew, except for her plumber, whom she sized up whenever her sink clogged. Of her cancer, she wrote that people always say that it alerts you to what is important, makes you a better person, but that, for herself, she found this to be more of the surfeit of bullshit in the world. Her brother moved in with her toward the end, and in one of the last scenes he describes, on camera, how he leaned over her as she lay in bed and kept kissing her forehead while she murmured, "That's so nice, that's so nice, that's so nice" and then, breaking down, he sobs that he should have done it more and sooner. She died in 2007, age 62.
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