I would be remiss not to mention the passing of Molly Ivins. I'll miss her and we're a worse-off place for not having her presence.
Among other things, among various places I call home, I'm part Texan. It's a difficult heritage to admit to oneself. Texas is a place of bigotry and blustering ignorance combined with a pomposity that is entirely unrelated to merit. The place inflicts people like George Bush on the world.
But... it's also a place with a rich and wonderful Mexican heritage, black heritage, more recently Vietnamese and Hmong, German, Czech. One of the things I've always appreciated most about the place is that part of the Texas constellation that produces people like Molly Ivins. Or Ann Richards. Or Willy Nelson, Ornette Coleman, The Butthole Surfers, Townes Van Zandt, Bob Wills, Lightnin' Hopkins, Buddy Holly, Quanah Parker, Barbara Jordan,.... All idiosyncratic. All original. All iconoclasts. And a dying part of Texas.
Iconoclastic, wise, unmoved by power, and decent, Molly Ivins fits neatly in that lineage, the one to be proud of. Sad to see you go, Molly.
1 comment:
My favorite from her NYTimes obit: "After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that the United States was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech 'probably sounded better in the original German.'"
and...
"When she declared of a congressman, 'If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,' many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper."
RIP Molly
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