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 election elevated 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. Bushwhacked came 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.
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