One of the sources for our living Unitarian Universalist tradition is "Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love." Certainly Martin Luther King's words and deeds do that. More than forty years have passed since his ministry on this earth and much has changed and much has improved regarding civil rights in this country. But not enough. His work continues in us.
Today, though, I did not plan to talk about King. I planned to talk about Molly Ivins. In mentioning her with Martin Luther King, Jr. I do not mean to compare or associate them, although one could say that the work of Martin Luther King was carried on in part by Molly Ivins. Each, in his and her different ways, can be understood as a prophet and as an inspiration to us. Molly Ivins, who died in January 2007 at age 62, deserves a look.
How many of you are familiar with Molly Ivins' work? She was a syndicated columnist, unabashed liberal, and student of American politics. She wrote Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? and with Lou Dubose, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America. She was working on a book documenting the current assaults on the Bill of Rights when she died. She couched original insights, intelligent personal opinion and factual content in a down-home style, "peppered with colorful phrases to create the "feel" of Texas." (www.wikipedia.com) She saw the absurdities of political life in this country and chose to laugh rather than cry or fall into cynicism. She said, "Good thing we've still got politics -- finest form of free entertainment ever invented."
That's her key contribution. Molly Ivins touches and inspires us with humor. Humor is powerful and we do well not to underestimate its value. Molly Ivins' humor is powerful because it is intelligent and creative and, often, laugh out loud funny. When we laugh, something opens inside us and physiologically energizes us. When we laugh, we see things differently. When we laugh, we find the possibilities. It's hard to despair when your being is full of laughter. Humor, the way Molly Ivins used it, is a kind of truth telling. Because of this we do not forget Molly Ivins' words. Because of this her words move us to take action.
Ivins' wit could sting and amuse at the same time and as you might expect, it got her into trouble more than once. For example, in speaking of James Collins, US Representative from Dallas, she wrote: "If his IQ slips any lower we'll have to water him twice a day." "This quotation engendered substantial controversy, with calls and letters pouring into her newspaper, The Dallas Times Herald. The newspaper turned the controversy into a publicity campaign, with billboards all over the city asking, "Molly Ivins can't say that ?¦can she?" ?”which she employed as the title for her first book." (www.wikipedia.com) It takes courage, creativity, talent, and intelligence to do what Molly Ivins did.
Molly Ivins was born in Monterey, California and raised in Houston, Texas. Her father was a corporate lawyer and her mother a homemaker with a B.A. in psychology from Smith College. Ivins followed her mother there, receiving her B.A. in 1966. She earned a master's degree at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, where she was the first woman police reporter in that city and she claimed that one of the greatest honors in her career occurred when the Minneapolis Police Department named their mascot pig after her. "She left the Tribune to write for the Texas Observer from 1970 to 1976. The New York Times, concerned that its prevailing writing style was too staid and lifeless, hired her away from the Observer in 1976, . . . During her run at the Times, Ivins became Rocky Mountain bureau chief, covering nine western states, although the writer was known to say she was named chief because there was no one else in the bureau. Her more colorful style clashed with the editors' expectations, and in 1982, after she wrote about a "community chicken-killing festival" and called it a "gang-pluck," she was dismissed." (www.wikipedia.com) She then wrote for the Dallas Times Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which was her home paper until 2001, when she became an independent journalist. Her column, distributed by Creators Syndicate at the end of her life, appeared in nearly 400 papers nationwide.
Ivins was convinced that a free society relies upon public interest journalism to speak for those not in power and to call the powerful to account. This she did, in her own unique style. Such "writers are useful, she explained to (a) crowd, (in January 2007), in much the same way as good hunting dogs. Turn them loose, let them hunt. When they return with their prey, pat them on the head, say a few words of praise, and set them loose to hunt again." (The Texas Observer, posted on www.alternet.org on January 31, 2007)
But Molly Ivins wasn't just about clever quips. Her writing approached life, not from a merely partisan perspective, but from a wider moral one that insisted on her government respecting the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I want to read you excerpts from columns written in 2006 in which you will hear her assessments of most every issue now under debate in the current presidential race. She was a prophet. Listen to this column on the economy.
Bush's Economy 'Doing Remarkably Well' By Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted October 24, 2006. "Oh, goody. According to the White House press office, President Bush will spend much of the next two weeks discussing what a swell economy we have. . . . Bush's version of "doing remarkably well" includes a trade gap -- now a record $69.9 billion -- up 2.7 percent since July. "Short of a big correction in consumer spending, the best we can hope for is that the trade deficit stabilizes," Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital, told Bloomberg.com.
Meanwhile, what we see in the economy as a whole is an immense shift of wealth from the poor and middle class to the very rich. It seems a little painful to have to point this out yet again after six solid years of it, but these are lies, damn lies and statistics. . . . incomes are stagnant and education and health care costs are skyrocketing. The . . . Congress blindly rubber-stamps policies designed to help only a few. Are you better off than you were six years ago?"
Here, also from 2006, (on AlterNet) she speaks about torture in Why the Torture Bill Matters. Only now, in 2008, have the issues she brings up received more widespread attention in the mass media. The film Taxi to the Dark Side, which I just saw at Upstate, also deals with the same cases. Ivins writes, ". . . The first reported case of death by torture by Americans was in The New York Times in 2003 by Carlotta Gall. The military had announced the prisoner died of a heart attack, but when Gall actually saw the death certificate, written in English and issued by the military, it said the cause of death was homicide. The "heart attack" came after he had been beaten so often on this legs that they had "basically been pulpified," according to the coroner. . . . The press in general has been late and slow in reporting torture, so very few Americans have any idea how far it has spread. As is often true in hierarchical, top-down institutions, the orders get passed on in what I call the downward communications exaggeration spiral. For example, on a newspaper, a top editor may remark casually, "Let's give the new mayor a chance to see what he can do before we start attacking him."This gets passed on as, "Don't touch the mayor unless he really screws up." And it ultimately arrives at the reporter level as, "We can't say anything negative about the mayor."
The version of the detainee bill now in the Senate not only undoes much of the McCain-Warner-Graham work, but it is actually much worse than the administration's first proposal. In one change, the original compromise language said a suspect had the right to "examine and respond to" all evidence used against him. The three senators said the clause was necessary to avoid secret trials. The bill has now dropped the word "examine" and left only "respond to." In another change, a clause said that evidence obtained outside the United States could be admitted in court even if it had been gathered without a search warrant. But the bill now drops the words "outside the United States," which means prosecutors can ignore American legal standards on warrants. The bill also expands the definition of an unlawful enemy combatant to cover anyone who has "has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." Quick, define "purposefully and materially." One person has already been charged with aiding terrorists because he sold a satellite TV package that includes the Hezbollah network. The bill simply removes a suspect's right to challenge his detention in court. This is a rule of law that goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215. That pretty much leaves the barn door open. As Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, wrote, an intelligence service free to torture soon "degenerates into a playground for sadists." But not unbridled sadism -- you will be relieved that the compromise took out the words permitting interrogation involving "severe pain" and substituted "serious pain," which is defined as "bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain." , , , Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints . . . -- these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law." From a column on "acivist judges" and illegal wire-tapping by communications companies :(2006 on AlterNet) "Another bee-you-ti-ful example of the right-wing media getting it all wrong. Here they are having the nerve to mutter in public about "activist judges" because Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has pointed out that spying without a warrant is illegal in this country -- so warrantless telephone tapping is illegal in this country. Improbably enough, the first complaint of many of these soi-disant legal scholars is that Taylor's decision is not well written. No judicial masterpiece, they sneer. Nevertheless, warrantless spying is illegal. Did it ever occur to these literary critics that Taylor has a lay-down hand? The National Security Agency program is flat unconstitutional, and for those who insist this means Osama bin Laden wins, it's also ridiculously easy to fix so that it is constitutional. Conservatives in this country have been yipping in chorus for years about "activist judges," and frankly, like fools, many of you bought into the phony political rhetoric about those terrible jurists. Somehow, activist judges are held responsible for gay marriage, Roe v. Wade and everything else Americans disagree about, as though Americans would never disagree without their encouragement."
Health care, the economy, torture, illegal wiretapping -- Molly Ivins covers it all. What do they have in common? They are all issues of human rights. Oh yes, Ivins was partisan and often took delight in skewering George Bush with her humor. Partisan, yes, but not ideological. Her conclusions were based upon her ethical understandings. Her touchstones seemed to be justice, equity and compassion in our society and in our world. Accountability to the law and to the people for all elected officials, of whatever party. Telling the truth as she saw it. Agree with her or not, I admire anyone in our world who takes a stand, not based upon personal power or interest, not based upon fanaticism or fundamentalism, but upon his/her carefully and openly thought out principles. I admire such a person for speaking out.
I want to let Molly Ivins have the last word, so I will share with you one of my favorite columns. It's about peace. Cow Whisperers Against the War by Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted August 29, 2006. "I know it's bad form to brag, but I am now a graduate of Texas A&M University, and you can't stop Aggie pride. I became a diplomee of the great institution in College Station after successfully completing the three-day short course in beef cattle this summer. I specialized in forage management and graduated "Quel fromage!" meaning "avec distinction." It is also true that I was banned from the campus of Texas A&M many years ago after some students invited me to make a political speech. Also Quel Fromage! So you see how far we have all come.
The most amazing part of cow college was meeting the cow whisperer. Think of everything you know about moving cattle from one place to another -- for shots, round-up or loading into trucks for market -- just physically moving a lot of cattle. GEE, GIT ON, GO DOGIE, whistle, whip crack, move 'em out, chase 'em down. Turns out all these years we've been doing it wrong. What happens when you scare a cow by making a lot of noise and chasing it down and forcing it to move where it doesn't want to go is the cow responds by relieving itself. And since a cow has three stomachs, it can unload up to 20 percent of its total weight at one go, the last thing you want just before you take it to market to sell. So the latest thing in cattle handling is cow whispering (I'm not making this up -- this is straight from A&M). Either on foot or horseback, you just kind of sidle around your herd without upsetting them, talk to them gently and suggest they might like to go THAT way for a while, and then perhaps a tour along the pen line, and then perhaps some consideration of the gate and another little tour of the pen line. But all of this is done without loud noise, sudden movements or eruptions of testosterone. It's such a revolutionary development of an American macho tradition it's a little like watching NFL teams come onto the field in tutus. But it also works a lot better on the cows. I bring this up because I recently attended a women's peace movement meeting, sponsored by the Code Pink group . . . I must say, they were a lot more emphatic than the cow whisperer. . . . Women peace activists, as rule, have totally solved the gnarly old dilemma: What do you do about hating the haters? If you're a woman peace activist, this is Step 101 -- you spill love and calm and reassurance and, well, peace all over them. . . . For those of us who have not mastered this advanced technique, a Revolution in Favor of Kindness and Libraries seems like a nice idea. . . . I am still lamentably stuck in the middle -- not that I hold with hating the haters, we can all see where that leads -- but I am always tempted to shout them down. "One, Two Three, Four: We Don't Want Your (blankety-blank) War." Now does that repel more potential supporters or attract more people who really NEED to sound off? What I learned from Code Pink is that this is not an either-or question. The peace movement is a matter of And and And and And. You just keep adding more people, from those like Sheehan, . . . to the Iraqi Veterans Against the War, easily the strongest, most moving group of young people in America. They have learned in the hardest way what politics is. War is about rounding up people with Shock and Awe and really loud noises, and about thinking you can herd them by hurting and killing them. . . . I'm founding Cow Whisperers Against the War."
Molly Ivins died a year ago this January. We can remember her for what she tried to do: write as a public interest journalist speaking for those not in power and calling the powerful to account as she understood that. In one of the very last columns she wrote, (posted January 12, 2007 on AlterNet) "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action . . . . Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"
May we take Molly Ivins' advice. May we live our lives for justice and human rights. May we live out loud, as she did. May it be so.