Molly Ivins died yesterday at age 62 from breast cancer. She was a columnist whose work I admired. She was a regular irritant on the editorial pages of the Richmond Times Dispatch. Richmond is quite the conservative town, so Ivins with her jaunty jabs at all things that conservatives hold dear was a regular lightning rod for letters to the editor. I'm glad that I wrote (and they published) my missive defending her work.
I occasionally get worked up (from the other bent) about things I read on the editorial pages of the paper. I spent an entire day researching the facts of a particularly inflammatory editorial about how poor men shouldn't be allowed to have their Viagra pills subsidized by the government (I'm not inviting discussion on that topic) and crafting my letter. To the paper's credit, they published my letter (and also conferred a "Correspondent of the Day" status to it).
There is always a little thrill (for people like me at least who lead unthrilling lives) when you see your name in print. I read an article in Barron's (horribly boring stuff about the upcoming FAS disclosures required of companies for the pension obligations) but I was incensed by the author's position. I was absolutely tickled that they published my letter. I'm not a bragging person by nature, but I bragged about it.
So I can say that my content shared the same pages as Molly's content, though her writing was luminous and mine was merely taking up newsprint real estate. And one needn't agree with a writer's opinions to recognize the importance of the sharing of his/her voice and perspective to round out discussion on matters of import. I applaud her courage to be an independent thinker and admire her talent to voice it in a way that shocked and entertained. I hope that should I have to fight a health battle such as hers, I could do it with measures of the grace, valor and most importantly, humor as she modeled.
And if you want to read an interesting blog entry about Molly, and visit an language blog go here.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/
2 comments:
My wife is a big fan of Ms. Ivens. From what I know of Ms. Ivens, I think she would find a eulogy that intermixes laudatory comments with the, hopefully not performance based, research of poor men's Viagra use hilarious. LOL
"hopefully not performance based, research of poor men's Viagra use hilarious" Too funny!
I was researching earning statistics on the census bureau's website to refute some of the more interesting statistics that were given in the editorial from the Heritage Foundation.
If I've learned anything this last year, everything that we see and read has someone's bias on it. And I have to say that for anything that I put forth as well.
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