The ranks of opinionated news addicts, op-ed rabble-rousers, small-town agitators, straight-faced wise-alecks, resistors, rough-edged local-color smartmouths and freedom-fighting newspaper columnists has lost a fine example.



I don’t want to make an icon out of a woman who reveled in being real; that would do her memory a disservice. Instead, I speak for many and say “thanks, dammit.”



To be a truly effective wise-aleck, and you know that’s not the expression I’d like to use, you’ve got to get your facts straight. Molly Ivins spent enough time hanging around down at the Texas State
Legislature in Austin to speak credibly and with authority.



When she painted pictures for us northerners of redneck intrapolitical mechanics, we knew she wasn’t making any of it up.



A journalist hadn’t ought to laugh too loud about the emperor marching down Broadway buck naked unless that journalist has stood out there since before daylight waiting for the parade.



You know what I mean. War correspondents need to duck bullets, Texas writers have to eat the chili, and political commentators have to watch the monkeys, not just read about it all on the Internet.



Humor is a great thing but intelligence is even funnier.



With the privilege of a regular column in a small newspaper, I get all sorts of suggestions handed me about where I ought to be paying attention, as in “Hey, you should write about this…”



Along with an infuriating tale of workplace injustice and a lot of stomach acid about school funding this week came a copy of an essay from The Nation which included a friendly call from the Berkeley Daily Planet (really) to columnists nationwide to participate in the “Molly Ivins Festschrift.”



The invitation defined a “Festschrift” as “a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar.”



Scholar, indeed. You might not think so, if you read Ivins’ columns as either entertainment or just more political commentary. It was one thing more, though: her work sought the middle ground, between heckling and reiteration, between jabs for laughs and tedious talking-head punditry. That’s not an easy line to find.



Her last essay included a promise to argue against the current war in every column from then on. There were, unfortunately, none to follow. One executive editor suggested that others columnists pick up the baton and run with it.



Herewith, my contribution to that cause, in the form of random comment in three parts.



First, and of least significance, those yellow magnetic ribbons everybody had on the stern end of their minivans until they fell off weren’t going to save lives or overcome dangerous regimes.



Asked once why I didn’t have one, I explained hzat to do my part, whenever possible in my column I mentioned neighbor Derek, the young Marine from our tiny island town who did two tours in Iraq.



Doing what little I could to remind less connected
readers that these service-people are not abstractions, but are kids from Maine who signed up to fix engines, seemed more supportive to our troops than buying a made-in-China decal.

Second, “radical Islamism,” so-called, offends me as much as it does anybody. I would never argue that it’s just local custom or any such fluff, or any less than terrifying with nuclear weapons. I cannot imagine anything worse than living under some of those conditions.



Still, war, real war, should be defensive only. I’m not talking “our interests,” which usually refer to somebody else’s wealth, but to kicking the tyrant off the homestead.



It’s too easy to brainwash the public when the ground rules are any less rigid than that. We must deeply examine our motives for involvement, and make sure they’re the right ones.



(Number two, subsection A: If we’re in this for a good reason then for goodness sake, pay these people enough! Soldiers wives on food stamps? You’ve got to be kidding!)



Third, we cannot successfully “make them behave” from outside. Subordination is always unstable, whether it’s the “bad guys” or the “good guys” in control. I don’t claim to know how to stabilize the Middle East and Central Asia, but I suspect that the brute force method won’t stick.



Everybody’s got opinions about the war and the politicians. Where Molly Ivins really excelled was her observation of the unabashedly unrefined side of Texas, the world of bumper stickers that y “Keep Austin Weird,” and the ability to have some insider fun with this idiosyncratic local
stuff without patronizing tone or overuse of the privilege.



If she were from Maine she’d meet Martin with another bulldozer, enjoy the food despite the politics at Baldacci’s, and never, ever say “ayuh” to a reporter.



A couple of us watched the Ivins’ clip on the NewsHour the other night, about “‘Ort’ in Texas.”



She took us on a video tour through some of the
aesthetic highlights of the Texas “ort” world, the statue of Jesus in cowboy boots, the state roach, and that category of “ort” which she called the “Cow On Building Genre.”



Laughing, we couldn’t help but wonder what she would have made of lobster trap Christmas trees.



As Molly Ivins knew so well, you just can’t make this (stuff) up.