The pint-sized, self-described ugly duckling, considered one
of if not the best rock vocalists, who bled her soul out every time she stepped
onstage opposite the tall and handsome hambone, long considered an archetype of
cheese, best known for having women’s underwear thrown at him onstage.
And yet somehow it works.
Written by Memphis soul musicians Al Bell, Eddie Floyd, and
Steve Cropper (of Booker T & the MGs), “Raise Your Hand” was part of Janis
Joplin’s concert repertoire at the time. Recorded fifty years ago today on Tom
Jones’ variety show, the one-off performance embedded below is full of period
details—Janis’s satin bellbottoms and flowing tie-dye tunic, Tom Jones’ black
silk Nehru shirt with billowing sleeves, surrounding them huge collars, a buckskin
jacket with fringe, the Technicolor fashions of the time.
Better yet, the music hums, from Janis’ thunderous vocals to
Tom Jones’ husky baritone to the uptown horn section to the smoking sax solo,
everyone and their neighbor infected by the groove. 1970 was just four weeks out, making this cultural artifact
a fitting capstone to the Swinging Sixties.
Watching the
documentary Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins was
like stumbling into a fond old friend I hadn’t seen in many years and having a
90-minute coffee klatch. Like millions of other Americans, I spent countless
hours through the years reading Ivins’ political columns without knowing much
of her back story. Raise Hell fills in Ivins’ history so that we see the
human being behind the singular writing voice.
Born in 1944, Ivins grew up in the
affluent River Oaks neighborhood of Houston, Texas. Patterns manifested early
on that would become a template for Ivins’ life. From a young age she was a
bookworm with a special appreciation of the written word. By age 12, she was six feet tall, making her self-conscious about her appearance and something of
an outsider at school. In her teen years, Ivins first challenged authority when
butting heads with her father, a patriarchal right-wing oil executive who felt
that children should be seen and not heard.
Like many in her
generation, Ivins’ interest in politics was sparked by the civil rights movement, helped along by the
temper tantrum her father threw when he came home from work to find Ivins and a
black male friend hanging out by the family pool. Unlike many women in her
generation, Ivins had no desire to stay home and raise children. After high school, she earned
a Bachelor’s Degree from Smith College in Massachusetts, then a Master’s from
the Columbia Journalism School in Manhattan.
While at Smith, Ivins crashed the
male-dominated field of journalism, interning for the Houston Chronicle.
In 1967, after completing graduate school, she worked for
the Star Tribune (later the Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Most
female journos of the time were shunted out to “food, fluff, and fashion,” but
Ivins reported on the intersection of poverty and race, the young radicals, and
police brutality. From the Tribune Ivins went to The Texas Observer,
which she described as “the only liberal publication in Texas.” While serving
as an editor for the Observer, Ivins published occasional op-ed columns
at the Washington Post and The New York Times.
Ivins’ op-eds and
work for the Chronicle, Star Tribune, and Texas Observer
catapulted her to a full-time position at The New York Times in 1976. Working at the Times would be the peak of most journalists’
careers, but it was just a weigh station for Ivins. Ivins’ Southern background
helped her land the plum assignment of writing Elvis Presley’s obituary, but it
put her at cultural odds with the stuffy East Coast newsroom and the hard-nosed
executive editor, Abe Rosenthal. Following a spell in the Manhattan
headquarters, Ivins’ outspokenness got her exiled to an isolated office in
Colorado, where she raised Rosenthal’s ire by playfully using the words “gang pluck”
to describe an all-day chicken slaughter she was reporting on (as explained in the video below).
Ivins truly hit her
stride in 1982 when she returned home to Texas to write for the Dallas Times Herald. At the Herald, Ivins was given
creative control, which allowed her voice to flower. Her
popularity continued to grow in the ’90s, when she switched to the Fort
Worth Star Telegram. Ivins’ first book (Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, 1992) made The New York Times bestseller list and her work was
syndicated by Creator’s Syndicate, which spread her columns to a peak of 400 newspapers, an exceptional level
of success in the field.
A populist with a social
conscience, Ivins consistently advocated for the
underdog—women, the poor, people of color, labor—and the public interest, showing
a distinct distaste for the parasitic machinations of the Washington and Texas
elite. Referring to rising inequality and the
increasing economic struggles of the lower and middle classes, Ivins said,
“shit flows downhill and the people at the bottom are drowning in it.”
The most unique aspect of Ivins’ writing
voice was her humor. Though she had spent several years out of state, in
Massachusetts, Paris, Manhattan, Colorado, and the Twin Cities, at heart Ivins was a down-to-earth Texas girl who liked (in her own
words) to hunt, cuss, and drink. As an unabashed liberal living in an
ultra-conservative state, she learned to buffer right-wing pestilence with laughter,
mocking transparently appalling Republican actions—and the lies they concocted to justify their actions—with a dry wit. Of Pat
Buchanan’s hateful culture war speech at the 1992 Republican convention, in
which he denigrated LGBTQ Americans, feminists, and environmentalists, Ivins
said, “It was better in the original German.”
Texas governor George
W. Bush’s ascendance to the White House following his theft of the 2000 electionelevated Ivins to a rarefied rank
in the commentariat. Having covered Texas politics off-and-on for three decades
at that point, Ivins was able to laser in on Bush’s
personal shortcomings, corruption, and devious policy decisions with a color
and precision that eluded the legions of journalists covering the Bush Administration.
Right before the 2000 presidential election, Ivins (with Lou Dubose) warned
voters of exactly what they could expect by documenting the actions of Governor (and then-presidential candidate) Bush in Shrub: the Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. A few years later, as
President Bush was in the process of running for a second term, she and Dubose
teamed up again. Their new collaboration was considered such a threat to the
administration that Ivins’ house was broken into and her laptop stolen. Bushwhackedcame out in 2004.
Bush gave Ivins
endless amounts of material, both as a humorist and a concerned citizen. A 1st
Amendment absolutist, Ivins wrote eloquently of the Bush Administration's assaults
on civil liberties (The Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, torture) and the
mistaken belief among many Americans that expansive government snooping was necessary
to keep us safe. Unlike the vast majority of mainstream American opinion writers of
the time, Ivins foresaw the folly of invading Iraq; two months before the
invasion, Ivins presciently wrote of the imminent operation “can you say horrible three-way civil war?”
Speaking truth to
power came at a cost for Ivins. Her acerbic wit and unwillingness to sugarcoat the grimness of the Bush years got her blackballed by the Houston Chronicle and other
publications who’d published her previously.
In 2005, Ivins’
breast cancer came out of remission. Never married and something of a loner, she spent the last two years of her life doing what she had
always done—writing up a storm. At the
time she passed away (in January of 20o7), Ivins was publishing two columns a
week and working on a book about the fragile state of the Bill of Rights. Her
estate included a major gift to the ACLU, which is receiving a portion of the proceeds from Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins (trailer below).
Raise Hell is not a standout documentary. The film provides a broad
life retrospective rather than a close-up of the remarkable body of work Ivins
produced over decades of reporting and opinion writing. Ivins’ significance can
only be fully appreciated by those of us who had the good fortune to read each
new column in real time, nodding along with the keen insights and throwing our
heads back in laughter at the sharp one-liners, even (especially) when the
subject matter was hard to digest.
All the same, director Janice
Engel should be applauded for rescuing Ivins from obscurity and creating the
first and only film tribute to one of the best—and most humane—political
columnists America has ever seen.
More political writing by Dan Benbow: Lingering Myths of the 2016 presidential election: Bernie was robbed by the DNC! The Iraq War turns 16;America sleeps The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia (a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush) Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism of voting Green 10 reasonsBarack Obama is clearly the best president in my lifetime 178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
The 2020
presidential election is more than a year away and America’s left is already
eating its own.
Apoplectic at the Trump
presidency and fearful of the horrifying long-term consequences of a potential
second Trump term, Democratic voters are involved in a heated debate over which
candidate to put up in 2020. The three candidates who are running away from the pack in opinion polling have been subjected to withering criticism—by Democrats. According
to whichever sect of armchair critic you’re interacting with at the moment, Joe
Biden is too old and too cozy with corporate interests, Bernie Sanders isn’t
really a Democrat and besides, we need a female candidate, but Elizabeth Warren
is too far left and can’t win a general election.
The level of engagement is
healthy and necessary, but the debate is riddled with false
narratives from 2016 that threaten to keep Donald Trump in the White House
until January of 2025:the Dems lose
when they don’t go left, Trump should be easy to beat, the Dems have abandoned working-class voters, and the most persistent myth of all, that
Bernie Sanders would have beaten Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary
if not for the actions of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Amazingly, this myth
continues to linger in the minds of many well-intentioned but misinformed people,
poisoning their attitude toward the Democratic Party, frontrunner Joe Biden
(disdainfully referred to as “the DNC’s candidate”), and even the act of voting
itself.
The particulars of
the Bernie-was-robbed theory are that Sanders would have won the primary if not
for the Clinton campaign’s control of DNC strategy and resources, debate
scheduling, closed primaries, registration challenges faced by new voters, and
the allotment of delegates and superdelegates.
The charge that Clinton’s
control of DNC strategy and resources played a key role in her primary victory
is a classic example of the correlation-proves-causation logical fallacy. Deep
in debt in 2015, the DNC cut a deal with Clinton that gave her an unusual level
of power over party decisions in exchange for her fundraising assistance. The arrangement was unsavory, and leaked emails showed that
DNC members wanted Clinton to win, but Sanders supporters never provided
concrete data showing precisely how the wishes of a relatively small
number of powerful people made a major difference in a year-long
campaign spread over 50 states and multiple U.S. territories that drew 30
million votes.
Flowing from this broad charge were a number of grievances. Sanders supporters had conniption fits when the DNC blocked the Sanders campaign's access to the party's shared voter database, but the block was initiated because a Sanders staffer hacked the Clinton campaign's voter data, and the issue was resolved quickly. Sanders supporters complained about Clinton's access to DNC financial resources, but this funding made up just a fraction of Clinton's total primary outlays and Sanders spent twice as much money as Clinton in 2016, so the impact was minimal. Sanders supporters claimed that their candidate was hurt by the DNC
decision to schedule a limited number of party-sanctioned primary debates, and few debates
during prime time hours. But the presumption that Sanders would have
significantly benefited from more exposure is purely speculative and ignores
Clinton’s razor sharp performance in all of the debates she was in in both 2008 and
2016. No public figure in the modern era has been more consistently prepared
and on-point in this format than Clinton, and there’s little evidence that
Sanders gained ground from the debates that were held in 2016. In fact,
other than the first 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, in which
Obama was uncharacteristically sluggish and on the defensive, no political
debate from the past couple decades moved public opinion other than around the
margins. Since Sanders beat
Clinton among independents, his supporters cried foul over the number of
primary races that were closed, i.e. primaries that only allowed registered
Democrats to vote. Whatever the merits of giving non-Democrats a role in choosing
the Democratic candidate, the primary rules were decided at the state level,
not by the DNC, and were in place well before the 2016 primary. While
criticizing the closed primaries on “Face the Nation,” Sanders himself said, “I wouldn’t use the word ‘rigged,’ because we knew what
the rules were.”
A third piece of the
theory that the 2016 primary was “rigged” was the contention that the challenges
faced by new voters and voters who were purged from voter rolls was the work of—or
done at the bidding of—the DNC. One could claim that the rules regarding
registration of new voters and the purging of voter rolls hurt Sanders more
than Clinton, as he did well among first-time voters, but the guidelines were
made by state and local government officials (many of them Republicans), not
the DNC. And some of these practices disproportionately disenfranchised people
of color—Clinton’s strongest constituency. Far from defending voter
suppression, Clinton proposed major reforms to increase access to the ballot while her campaign sued to overturn voting restrictions in multiple
states.
Sanders supporters also made a
lot of noise about delegates and superdelegates. The attacks on theallotment
of delegates among Sanders supporters could be seen as legitimate in those
states where Clinton received a higher proportion of delegates than she had won
in the popular vote, but Sanders’ supporters lacked such outrage when their
candidate benefited from other states’ undemocratic caucus systems, in which
delegates parceled out weren’t proportional to the popular vote.
As to superdelegates, Clinton’s
broad support from the beginning of the primary process may have given
her a psychological advantage (in convincing people to vote for Clinton because
they thought her candidacy was inevitable), but her superdelegate lead over
Barack Obama in the beginning of the 2008 primary had no impact on that race,
and for all of the sound and fury about delegates and superdelegates in 2016,
delegates and superdelegates had virtually nothing to do with the results of
the primary.
If one believes that
the party nominee should be chosen by the popular vote, as Sanders supporters
said when it came to the disbursement of delegates and superdelegates, then
Clinton won the primary easily, by 3.7 million votes, a 56%-44% margin.
(Ironically, once the votes were cast and it was clear that Clinton would win
the nomination, Sanders told NBC news that the superdelegates “have a very
important choice to make,” insinuating that they should consider flipping to
his side and making him the nominee, though he had lost the popular vote
overwhelmingly.)
A close look at the composition of primary votersremoves any
mystery as to why Clinton won by a landslide. Sanders
did well among young voters, independents, and rural voters, but these blocs
make up a small share of the Democratic primary electorate. Clinton won or tied
all economic and educational strata and dominated bigger voting blocs:
older voters, moderate Democrats, registered Democrats as a whole, as well as
suburban and urban voters—African-Americans in particular. Today’s Democratic
Party is diverse and increasingly urban; it’s mathematically impossible to become
the Democratic nominee solely by winning independents who aren’t allowed to
vote in many primaries, rural and white voters who are shrinking as a
percentage of the total, and the 18-27-year-old demographic, who vote in the
smallest numbers.
For all of the hostility leveled
at Clinton from the left, and the constant claim that she felt entitled to “a
coronation,” the simple fact is that she worked much longer and harder for the
nomination than Sanders. Starting in 1972, when she
registered voters of color in Texas for the upcoming presidential race between
George McGovern and Richard Nixon, Clinton spent decades campaigning for
Democratic candidates, raising money for Democratic candidates, going to party
events and planning meetings, holding policy forums and town hall meetings,
networking with party functionaries, and cultivating key constituencies. And
unlike Sanders, she didn’t change her registration at the last minute to run in
the primary; she had been a registered Democrat for 48 years when she ran in
2016. Decades of grunt work created a loyal foundation in the Democratic base
that Bernie didn’t have.
In short, Hillary Clinton won
the nomination the old-fashioned way—by earning it—but the anger and
indignation spawned by the demonstrably false “rigged primary” talking point
drove a crucial number of Sanders supporters away from Clinton and helped to
give us President Trump.
Those who continue to peddle
this noxious myth in 2019 (or cart out the DNC whipping boy yet again to sneer
at Joe Biden’s consistent lead in the polls) only fuel baseless rancor and
splinter the anti-Trump vote, just as Vladimir Putin planned it. The bottom
line is that there are more of us than there are of them, and winning at the
presidential level is very, very straightforward: united we stand,
divided we fall.
More political writing by Dan Benbow: The Iraq War turns 16;America sleeps The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia (a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush) Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism of voting Green 10 reasonsBarack Obama is clearly the best president in my lifetime 178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
I re-watched Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" last Sunday, on the 30th anniversary of its release. On some levels, the movie is a time capsule. It opens with Rosie Perez—dressed in a series of bodysuits, sporting a classic ’80s hairdo—dancing to Public Enemy as the credits roll.
At the same time, the film is still fresh and all too relevant.
The story takes place in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on a scorching summer day; as morning breaks, local DJ Mr. Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) announces that the temperature will get up to 100 degrees.
Lee, who grew up in Brooklyn, expertly captures the dense urban energy of blunt, fast-paced dialogue, steady foot traffic on the brownstone-fronted sidewalks, and the racial tension that runs through the ethnic polyglot of white, Korean, black, and Puerto Rican residents.
Mookie (Spike Lee) straddles the main fault line in the plot and the tricky feelings around race that drive the movie. He is a delivery man at Sal’s Pizzeria, the only black employee at an Italian-run business. The owner (Sal, played by Danny Aiello) and his youngest son are at peace with the local black community, but the older son Pino (John Torturro) is filled with rage and prejudice that Mookie can’t abate in one of the many pointed discussions of race in the movie.
Things heat up when Mookie’s friend Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) throws a fit because Sal’s walls have photos of famous Italian-Americans but no African-Americans, though the clientele are overwhelmingly black. Seeking to form a boycott of Sal’s, he finds an ally in Radio Raheem, a towering figure who struts through the neighborhood cranking “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy on his 20-battery boombox.
While this plotline simmers, Lee gives us a series of vignettes of street life—kids running to the ice cream truck, people bathing in an open fire hydrant, three middle-aged locals sitting on the sidewalk light-heartedly ribbing each other while going nowhere in particular, a boombox face-off, and the wanderings of Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), a benign drunk with a ruffled dignity who tells Mookie, “Doctor, always do the right thing.”
The question is: with an issue as complicated as race, what is the right thing?
Mookie is torn between the pacifist message of love and universal brotherhood espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the message of self-reliance and self-defense “by any means necessary” voiced by Malcolm X. Radio Raheem has four gold rings on his right hand that spell L-O-V-E and four on his left that spell H-A-T-E (see video below). Toward the end of the movie, when a shouting match at Sal’s ends in a fatal act of police brutality, Mookie has to choose between the two.
The explosive finale is both shocking and inevitable. As happened in Lee’s most recent movie, “BlacKkKlansman,” sudden violence disturbs the audience and forces them to think about a subject that most—white Americans in particular—would rather ignore. Donald Trump’s ascendance shows how little the United States has evolved over the past three decades, but the lack of progress isn’t limited toopenly racist Republicans. Just as the edgy, urgent “Do the Right Thing” lost in the Oscar race to a safe, crowd-pleasing melodrama (“Rain Man”), the edgy, urgent “BlacKkKlansman” was bypassed by left-leaning (mostly white) Academy voters for a safe, crowd-pleasing melodrama (“Green Book”), showing that America’s dominant fallback on race continues to be full-blown denial.
