Another American Hero Passes On

Death of a Hellraiser: Mourn the Dead, Fight like Hell for the Living

Molly Ivins fought to the end, and asks us to do the same.

Josh Harkinson January 31 , 2007

Molly Ivins, an impassioned columnist, longtime Mother Jones contributor and iconic voice of Texas populism, passed away at her home in Austin today after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62. Her syndicated columns mercilessly pilloried Republicans, and spineless Democrats, but unlike many writers in that form, she was a conoisseur of politics as surreal comedy and once called Texas electioneering "the finest form of free entertainment ever invented." The daughter of a conservative Houston attorney and a teenage acquaintance of President George W. Bush, she was a grand peculiarity in a proudly peculiar state. "I dearly love the state of Texas," she wrote, "but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults."

In 1970, Ivins left her first newspaper job, at the Minneapolis Tribune, to write for the Texas Observer, a muckraking progressive biweekly where she'd always maintain ties. In 1976 the New York Times hired her away in an effort to inject itself with more writerly oomph, which she offered in surfeit: after describing a community chicken killing festival as a "gang pluck," she was fired. She returned to Texas and penned a column in the Dallas Times Herald for ten years until the competing Dallas Morning News bought the paper and shut it down. "My newspaper died the other day," she wrote that year in Mother Jones. "Its death was a kick in the gut the likes of which I cannot recall ever having experienced." At the same time, Ivins' first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? was flying off the shelves, and she quickly landed a job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where her column would become one of the most widely read in America.

Although Ivins was best known as an opinion writer, her down-home style also made her a dangerous reporter among Texas good ol' boys. In a 1988 Ms. Magazine article on U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson’s secretarial hiring criteria, she quoted him as saying, "You can teach 'em to type, but you can't teach 'em to grow tits," almost ending his career. Her 20 years of reporting for Mother Jones included a critique of Rush Limbaugh, musings on Texas activism, and an April 2000 story on the ephemeral businesses of then-presidential-candidate George W. Bush, who "flipped his oil companies faster than a Texas S&L can daisy-chain a Dallas condo." After Bush took power and began jostling to invade Iraq, Ivins became a vocal critic of the plan, telling Salon that "it's what we do after we win that's the problem. This rosy scenario where Iraqis greet us by dancing in the street and democracy follows one after the other in the domino theory of Southeast Asia just strikes me as ludicrously optimistic."

In 2002, Ivins wrote "Who Needs Breasts, Anyway?", an article for Time about her experience with cancer. "Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun," she said. "First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that." She was optimistic about her health and, last November, told Texas Monthly that her doctor had said she had "years" to live, and she continued writing her column even as the disease returned with a vengeance. Her last piece, opposing the Bush Administration's Iraq surge, ran on January 11th, and like so much of Ivins' work, ended with an optimistic call to action. "We are the people who run this county," she said. "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to stop this war. Raise hell."

Josh Harkinson is an Investigative Reporter at Mother Jones.

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