Sunday, November 24, 2019

"Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins"


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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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 reasons Barack 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 breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust              

"Truth and Beauty" film reviews:





     
"Battle of the Sexes"

                                                                        "American Hustle"

                                                                        "BlacKkKlansman"


                                                                               "Trumbo"