Alas, I Am More Cynical

[fj]

What Molly Ivins taught me is that speaking truth doesn't change shit. I'd read her work and think "My god if even half of this is true, why are these people still free?" Yet they kept being free. Her columns are hilarious lists of excesses both in the Texas state and US national legislatures, and in the end, the people she despised and exposed got to vandalize their territories on and on to greater profit, and she was marginalized.

Comments

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

a lot of reporters (and not only they) love futility and fatalism and margins, btw. it lets them drink, or act out in whatever weird way.

[fj.livejournal.com]

Interesting thought, I was not aware of this.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

But in private, Ms. Ivins, too, battled alcohol, and had her coterie of human shields; they were protecting a woman whose loneliness was as incomprehensible as it was omnipresent. She was a performer who rarely allowed herself to be offstage, which, of course, ensured that the majority of us kept our distance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/opinion/03swartz.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1