The Nation magazine editors tonight emailed an invitation to celebrate Molly Ivins on her passing, which I pass on. She often wrote for the magazine.
The nation's mostly widely syndicated progressive columnist and a great friend of The Nation, Molly Ivins died today at age 62 after a long battle with what she referred to as a "scorching case of cancer." John Nichols' tribute to the warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen is the first in a series of appreciations we plan to publish. As he writes, "If anyone picked a fight with the powerful, she was there, writing with passion, humor and unbridled joy." She'll be dearly missed.
John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation, is the first Nation contributor to pen his thoughts about her. Others will undoubtedly follow.
Molly Ivins always said she wanted to write a book about the lonely experience of East Texas civil rights campaigners to be titled No One Famous Ever Came. While the television screens and newspapers told the stories of the marches, the legal battles and the victories of campaigns against segregation in Alabama and Mississippi, Ivins recalled, the foes of Jim Crow laws in the region where she came of age in the 1950s and '60s often labored in obscurity without any hope that they would be joined on the picket lines by Nobel Peace Prize winners, folk singers, Hollywood stars or senators.
And Ivins loved those righteous strugglers all the more for their willingness to carry on.
The warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen with the purpose of calling the rabble to the battlements, Ivins understood that change came only when some citizen in some off-the-map town passed a petition, called a Congressman or cast an angry vote to throw the bums out.
The rest of the article in which Nichols describes the life and mind of this liberal treasure can be read here:
http://www.thenation.com/...