Good Golly, We Miss You, Molly

©2016 by John LaTorre

Once upon a time, there was a writer named Molly Ivins. She was a good ol’ girl from Texas and never forgot that, although she was born in California and educated at Smith College and Columbia University. And she was that rarest of the rare: a hard-nosed Texas liberal along the lines of John Henry Faulk, Ann Richards, Bill Moyers, and Jim Hightower (all of who were her personal friends). She became a columnist for a number of publications, where she displayed a flair for showing us the humor, insanity, and significance of politics on the state and national level. She died in 2007.

It’s a real temptation to fill out this essay with nothing but quotes from her, because she was one of the most quotable people of the twentieth century. There are going to be a lot of them, anyway, because nobody could articulate what was on her mind than she could. I beg forgiveness from Random House and everybody else who owns the rights to her work now, but it can’t be helped. And I encourage you to read her books first hand; most of them are still in print, beginning with Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? and continuing nearly up to her death.  She often said that, in her view, the primary function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. I don’t know if that was original with her, but there is no better phrase to sum up her career.

The book I’ll be quoting from here is Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, published in 1993. Written a quarter of a century ago, it has an astonishing relevance to the current political campaign. In that race, a slick liberal policy-wonk lawyer named Clinton is running for president in a race against a billionaire populist with no government experience and a Republican who, when not reading from a TelePrompter, come across as an incoherent salad of scraps of words and ideas. The main difference is that the Clinton is now female, and the other two candidates have been combined into one.

The billionaire populist at that time was H. Ross Perot. “Ross Perot is fundamentally a superb salesman. So superb that it amounts to a form of genius,” Molly wrote. “Over the years, he has become far more sophisticated in his analysis of political issues, but he retains the glib salesman’s tendency to reduce complex realities to catchy slogans… He is still given to the sort of sweeping statements he made twenty years ago: ‘Pollution? That’s an easy one. No question about it … Give me the choice of having all those industries dumping pollutants into the rivers or the choice of having no factories, and I’ll have the factories. I can clean up the rivers in five years.’ This is not a man who has grasped the concept of dead oceans.” Any more than Trump grasps the concept of climate change, it seems.

In the same article, Molly pointed out the futility of electing rich people with no government background to office, without them even running for a city or county office first. “Why do they always want to buy the governorship or senatorship? Or, in the case of Perot, who’s richer than God, the presidency? It’s enough to make you yearn for the good old days, when rich guys just bought racehorses and yachts.

“Because when these rich guys get into office, we find they’re disastrous as political leaders. They’re so accustomed to working in hierarchical, top-down organizations—where they can fire anyone who doesn’t jump high enough—they go berserk with frustration when nobody jumps at all. You can get elected governor, but you can’t fire the Legislature, or even the Egg Marketing Advisory Board. Our last Big Rich Governor was Bill Clements, ’87 to ’91, who, when he tried to learn Spanish, inspired the observation, ‘Good, now he’ll be bi-ignorant.’”

 But Perot’s biggest problem was his shaky grasp of reality. “Ross Perot is a liar,” Molly wrote. “It’s really quite striking and leaves me with a certain respect for professional politicians, who lie with such artistry, such deniability, such masterful phraseology that they can always deny their denials later on.

“Perot lies the way Henry Kissinger used to lie but without Kissinger’s air of grave, weighty authority. Perot just flat-out lies. What’s more, when he lies, he accuses everyone else of lying. He never said this; he never said that; he never said the other. They’re making it all up. They’re all liars.” And twenty-four years later, we’ve got Lyin’ Ted, and Lyin’ Hillary. Déjà vu.

Elsewhere, Molly describes Perot’s penchant for seeing all adversities as conspiracies, in a way that seems to presage Trump’s allegations that the upcoming election will be rigged against him. “That squirrelly little part of his brain that will never allow him to admit he’s wrong about anything comes up with these fantastic rationales for his own flaky behavior. A Perot presidency would be like the time of the papist plots in England. Conspirators sighted everywhere, evidence no object.” Elsewhere, she brings up a weird tale about how Republican dirty-tricksters were going to torpedo the wedding of Perot’s daughter Carolyn. “In true conspiracy-nut fashion, Perot has decided that anyone who doesn’t believe his conspiracy theory is part of the conspiracy. Does the FBI fail to find a scintilla of evidence to back up Perot’s claims? Why, then, the FBI is clearly a tool of the dirty Republicans. Do the police say that Perot’s source on this ridiculous alleged plot is a well-known fantasist? Why, then, the police must be in on it too!”

And, of course, the media were favorite targets. Perot was notoriously sensitive about how he felt the media were against him, about which Molly wrote, “…he would blame it on the media being unfair, for not putting the right interpretation on what he said or meant to say, and he would then attempt to instruct or lecture the press on how we were to interpret him. It was painful to watch. When you run for public office, you don’t get to decide what other people think of you.” Today, it’s even more painful to watch the press corps hustled into chicken-wire enclosures at rallies, where they are pointed out as enemies and targeted for humiliation. As in other areas, Trump is going even further than Perot, or any of his other fellow candidates of the previous century, had ever dared to go before.

While Perot was better at grabbing headlines, he turned out not to be serious challenger to the incumbent President. The parallels here are less distinct, but there is a common thread that Bush’s re-election campaign suffered from a lack of vision, offering little guidance beyond the general sentiment that the best way to govern is to let business do its thing and wait for the inevitable prosperity to trickle down to the people who need it. In this sense, Bush reflected the prevailing Texas philosophy that the primary purpose of government is to foster a hospitable environment for “bidness,” the citizenry be damned. Likewise, Trump thinks that the best way for the economy to improve is to make government get out of the way and let business do business.

I find another parallel. Molly’s descriptions of George H. W. Bush’s appearances on television remind me a lot of Trump’s appearance at the debates and at his rallies. “George Bush without a TelePrompter can scarcely produce an intelligible sentence. I’ve been listening to him since 1966 and must confess to a secret fondness for his verbal dyslexia. Hearing him has the charm and suspense of those old adventure-movie serials: Will this man ever fight his way out of this sentence alive? As he flops from one syntactical Waterloo to the next, ever in the verbless mode, in search of the long-lost predicate, or even a subject, you find yourself struggling with him, rooting for him. What is the man trying to say? What could he possibly mean? Hold it, I think I see it!”  As someone who has found it impossible to clearly diagram any impromptu sentence of Trump’s that is over fifteen words long, I find the resemblance striking. (And it might be worth noting that the hand gestures Bush used in his speeches were choreographed by one Roger Ailes, whom Donald Trump recently recruited for the same purpose.)

Molly also wrote a lot about the disparity in wealth. He pointed out that while the eighties and early nineties saw one of the greatest increases in productivity in modern history, almost all the wealth created by that productivity went to the top one percent. That’s even more true today. And she also saw how our communications companies were agglomerating: “At the end of World War II, 80 percent of American newspapers were independently owned. Today [1992], almost without exception they are owned by one of fifteen chains.” And now it’s fewer than that, and it’s also true of television and radio as well … in fact, it’s often the same chains.

And I could go on for pages and pages about some of the other subjects that Molly raised in essays in this book: health care, the rise of women’s political power, the artful use of redistricting to deprive people of political power, and the effects of unemployment. (After the paper she worked for went belly-up, she compared the experience to having her horse shot out from under her.) That such a book, written almost a quarter of a century ago, is still relevant to our current situation is a marvel. Or maybe not. She was only seeing what any intelligent, clear-headed commentator could see on the horizon. The big issues haven’t gone away, despite our fervent wish that they would.

Our world is not devoid of political commentators, of both liberal and conservative stripes, but seldom do we hear one with such a fine ear for the humorous. We have Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver, and their mentor Jon Stewart, but these people come off more strident than Molly ever did. Even her enemies liked her, and she liked most them as people if not as politicians. “George W. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer,” I heard her say at a lecture just before she died, “but there’s not a mean bone in his body.” She had similar kind words for most of her subjects, even as she pilloried them in the press when (in her opinion) they went all stupid on her. She couldn’t have done otherwise, and I doubt that they’d have let her do otherwise. She loved practical jokes, even when they were played on her (she recounts the time that Perot called her to complain about his treatment. He called collect, and she took the call without thinking that maybe Perot could have paid for it himself).

People either loved or hated her writing, but mostly they respected it, because it was well researched. She had her facts straight, and they knew it. When asked for her opinion on what government was supposed to do, she would quote the preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence: “I believe government should be used in order to form a more perfect Union, to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. God, as the architects say, is in the details.

“I believe that all men and women are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe that governments are instituted among men and women, driving their just powers from the consent of the governed, to secure these rights. And that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”

All well and good, but then she adds: “I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults. If Texas were a sane place, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.”  And in the last essay of the book, she wrote: “The thing is this: You got to have fun while you're fightin' for freedom, 'cause you don't always win… And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

But go thee now, and get some Molly for yourself. She’s in bookstores, she’s in libraries, she’s on the Internet. And she’s more relevant than ever. God, I miss her.