Molly Ivins appeared at a panel discussion at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy today. She came in wearing all black, including a black hat, and using a cane. She's lost a lot of weight and her voice is much softer but she still has her keen mind and that Texas tang to her words. Her take on the modern media landscape is that the newspaper owners seem to be committing suicide. It was an economic and class argument and, of course, nobody else on the panel, including Garance Franke-Ruta, Jack Shafer, and EJ Dionne, picked up on her point.
I went to see her because I'd heard that her cancer had returned and I wanted to thank her in person for her work while I had the chance. After the end of the panel, I took the opportunity to tell her that there were more people who loved her than she knew, thanked her for her work, and said that I wanted to see her columns on the coming war crimes tribunal for the Bush junta, complete with the picture of her sitting on W's lap many years ago.
"How did you know about that?" she said.
"You wrote about it. I read your work," I replied.
Send Molly your good thoughts. We need her to write those columns datelined from the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It's only just.
Updated title so that no more people get the shivers at the simple mention of her name, except, that is, for those people who deserve to get the shivers at the simple mention of her name.