First Barbara Jordan – the voice of Watergate and justice, then Ann Richards – who could barbeque you with a phrase, and now Molly – whose gentle humor covered a deeply felt sense of social justice.
The three of the best things to come out of the Lone Star state are all gone.
Rest in peace.
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Established: 21 November 2004
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7 comments
Sigh.
Double sigh.
I was missing her commentary in our local liberal rag for a while. Now there won’t be any more.
Bryan, Off-topic but with your background, I thought you’d like this story.
http://chrisdolley.livejournal.com/65265.html
Her style was such a powerful counterpoint to the screaming of so many. She made her points without being nasty. She graduated from Smith a year before I started to make trips up there from Colgate, so I missed my opportunity to say I knew her when…
OT: thanks, Kevin. I wonder how many things my Dad never talked about, and think of things I will never mention [not as important or exciting] because an oath is an oath.
Almost a decade ago, a musician colleague’s wife described Molly’s style to me as “shrill.” The word was not relentlessly flung at us by the Right back then, as it undoubtedly is now. I was dumbfounded. I was a guest in their house outside of Austin while we rehearsed a concert, so I didn’t make a fuss. But I count that as the moment at which my awareness crystallized that the political dialogue of ordinary citizens, not merely of politicians (that was, after all, about the time of the Clinton impeachment), had fractured along party lines. Shrill? Give me a break! Harley Sorensen was sometimes shrill in his SF Gate columns. The late Erwin Knoll was sometimes shrill on the News Hour, because he was the only left-of-center voice in the weekly political discussions. (When Knoll died, Jim Lehrer didn’t replace him with another comparable commentator. Lehrer was and is prejudiced against anyone remotely liberal, and has reportedly called us “whiners,” though not on the air.) But Molly? shrill? I don’t think so. She even found something good to say about GeeDubya when he was first selected. I guess mean people see only their own mean selves in anyone who disagrees with them strongly, however civil the disagreement.
OT: that incident, in broad outline, is known and occurs in later published sources on both Allied and German sides of that war. I first read of it in a popular, layman-level German book on code breaking by Rudolf Kippenhahn, first published in 1999, then in 2000 in English translation. But the fact that a blogger among us has a direct family connection to this crucial incident in the history of the breaking of Enigma codes is truly cool. (I do not think my father knew any war-related secrets, but if he did, he took them with him when he died.)
She pointed out foolishness, she didn’t try to hurt people. She had been around long enough to surely have had knowledge about people that would have really hurt, but she didn’t use it. People don’t appreciate having their hypocrisy mentioned to the world, but she didn’t try to destroy anyone, like most of the MSM who went after the Clintons. She didn’t give anyone a free ride if they messed up, regardless of party label. It’s not her fault that the Republicans took over Texas and made such a mess.
OT: this is one of the things that really gets to me about the last several Republican Presidents – they have all, from Nixon forward revealed things that should have been secret for political ends while burying things as classified that had nothing to do with security beyond their job security or the security of their “legacy.”
Yep…I was sorry to read about this death and she was one of my fav columnists. And at 62 was hardly beyond the prime of her life! *weep*