opinion

Also in this section:
Sirias, Daniel Ortega in retrospect
Jackson, The late great Molly Ivins
Bernal, About authorities
Gutman, The danger in the Middle East
Lerner, The "New Anti-Semitism"
Donovan, Uruguayan pulp fiction
Henke, Is Cuba really at a crossroads?
Pilgrim, The Iraq War from a Caribbean perspective

Silié, Fidel Castro and the Youth Revolution of the 50s and 60s

Reporters Without Borders, 2006 was a year of danger for journalists in the Americas

The late great Molly Ivins

When will we find another worthy successor to Mark Twain?

by Eric Jackson

Progressive journalists everywhere, the Democratic Party, fans and practitioners of the Texas vernacular and many, many others went into mourning on the evening of January 31. That's when syndicated columnist Molly Ivins lost her long battle with cancer, and American culture lost its most worthy heiress to the position established and long held by Mark Twain.

Mostly they don't teach the writings of Mr. Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, in the American schools these days. Some of it is because of stupidities like picketing to take Huckleberry Finn off of school library shelves on the allegation that it's racist because of the character Nigger Jim, with the right-wing racists chuckling and going along in order to suppress the classic anti-slavery novel. Mark Twain was a white journalist from the slave state of Missouri who backed Abraham Lincoln in America's apocalyptic Civil War and a celebrated novelist who lent great aid and comfort to the great Union general, Ulysses S. Grant, as he faced his final illness in poverty. He was a member and the main financial supporter of the New England Anti-Imperialist League, a stalwart critic of the Spanish-American War and the ensuing brutal struggles to suppress Catholic independence fighters and Muslim separatists in the Philippines. He was the man who, in the course of his anti-racist satire Pudd'nhead Wilson, wrote that "there is no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress."

But what made Mark Twain the first true giant of American literature was not so much his politics but his brilliant pioneering work in American regional vernacular. The content of his writings was so outstanding that it got them translated into dozens of languages, but the style could never translate.

Molly Ivins was every bit the progressive that Mark Twain was. She reveled in the vernacular of the Texas where she was raised and for that was dismissed by the most destructive stuffed shirts in American journalism but was beloved by millions of people who didn't even particularly like her politics.

Abe Rosenthal will go down in history as an infamous character who wormed his way into the position of managing editor of The New York Times. His force-out of Molly Ivins in 1980 should not go down in history as his most nefarious deed. After all, he made a regular habit of suggesting that anyone who doesn't support everything that the government of Israel does is some sort of a Nazi, and yet he sold out one of his own reporters in order to help the Reagan administration cover up an act of genocide, the massacre of the civilian population of El Mozote, El Salvador by US-advised Salvadoran troops.

No, in the ouster of Molly Ivins from the New York Times staff Rosenthal did not act the part of accessory after the fact to mass murder. It was just the stupidest, albeit not the most evil, thing that he ever did.

Ivins, then head of the Rocky Mountain bureau for the Times, described a New Mexico community's chicken festival as a "gang pluck," for which Rosenthal had her demoted. She quit and went back to Texas, where she was a columnist for several newspapers and later an independent in national syndication. As the Times circulation sank Ivins's columns became ever more popular and her books rose to the top of the Times best sellers lists.

She was the bane of George W. Bush, whom she knew since they were high school kids. She still is his nemesis --- Molly Ivins may no longer be with us, but her dismissive moniker for the second Bush president, "Shrub," is now part of the American vernacular and will be long after the nightmare of his presidency is behind us. In her last column she cheered on the antiwar protesters then converging on Washington: "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!' "

So you won't find eulogies to Molly Ivins in any of the faux independent English-language websites that Donald Rumsfeld established around the world. But the American Civil Liberties Union mourned Ivins, who was one of their own. ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero established a special fund in her honor and opined in a press statement that "her cutting wit, remarkable intellect and down-home wisdom will be terribly missed."

Patriot movement stormtroopers and pyramid scheme hustlers using ideological or religious covers won't lower their flags to half staff, but they're greatly outnumbered by those who grieve at the passing of the lady who wrote that Pat Buchanan's "cultural war" speech to the 1992 GOP national convention "probably sounded better in the original German."

Many timid, corrupt or lame-brained politicians may breathe sighs of relief now that Molly Ivins isn't there to skewer their kind, but the woman who warned of an approaching Texas legislative session by remarking that "our very own dreaded Legislature is almost upon us. Jan. 9 and they'll all be here, leaving many a village without its idiot" will prompt smiles for years to come, in whatever language into which she may be translated.

Vaya con Dios, Molly. The crooks and idiots will always be with us, but the inspiration you left us as your legacy will aid our resistance to them for a long time to come.

Sirias, Daniel Ortega in retrospect
Jackson, The late great Molly Ivins
Bernal, About authorities
Gutman, The danger in the Middle East
Lerner, The "New Anti-Semitism"
Donovan, Uruguayan pulp fiction
Henke, Is Cuba really at a crossroads?
Pilgrim, The Iraq War from a Caribbean perspective

Silié, Fidel Castro and the Youth Revolution of the 50s and 60s

Reporters Without Borders, 2006 was a year of danger for journalists in the Americas