Henrietta Hay's Column

I've been telling people that I want to be Molly Ivins when I grow up. I'm a lot more serious about this than they suspect. I think she is the smartest and funniest political columnist writing today. Publishers Weekly agrees. They said, "Ivins...is arguably the best thing to happen to American journalism since Merganthaler came up with his famous Linotype."

Her second book, "Nothin' but good times ahead," has just been published. If you take life, American politics, Texas, the Republicans and H. Scott Perot with deadly seriousness, you may want to stop here, although the Democrats do not get off unscathed.

"Nothin' but good times ahead" is a collection of Ivins' writings for various newspapers and magazines during 1992 presidential election, a ripe and lush field of material for Molly, a feminist, a liberal, a Democrat and a populist. She claims that "liberal populist" is not an oxymoron. And, in the words of Publishers Weekly, "she has a B.S.detector as sensitive as an electron microscope and a vocabulary that, when she is riled, goes beyond earthy." She is now a syndicated columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and, as folks in east Texas refer to her, "an arthur." Her freelance work appears in such magazines as Time, Ms., Esquire, Atlantic and Mother Jones.

Molly Ivins is Texas with a world view and an offbeat sense of humor. She is a highly educated and sophisticated woman of warmth and compassion. But she pokes fun at nearly everything politically conservative with such skill and humor that even the attacked can laugh - or can they?

When she writes of Texas, it is quite obvious that she knows and loves her subject, while she laughs at the bubbas and the State Lege and all the other idiosyncrasies of that weird state. Really though, what happens in Texas is not all that different from what happens everywhere else. It just happens with an accent. Colorado has its own version of the Texas Lege but no one to record it with such deadly humor.

The cover picture on her first book, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?" shows a relaxed, grinning, six foot tall woman with her feet up on a table, dressed in a rumpled western shirt, jeans and boots. This was before the make-up artists and hair stylists got hold of her for the more formal cover picture on her second book. I hope she fires them.

She says a lot about herself in the essay telling about her Smith College reunion. She says, "Our most famous graduates are Nancy Reagan, Julia Child, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, which is enough to give you some respect for the variety of white, middle-class women in this country...I was sure I'd be a cuckoo in the nest--a left-wing, aging-Bohemian journalist, who never made a shrewd career move, never dressed for success, never got married, and isn't even a lesbian, which at least would be interesting." She counts her two greatest honors that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A & M.

We have lots of excellent political columnists with all sorts of political views, most of them very serious. Only occasionally does one of them show a flash of humor. After all, American politics, when you let yourself think about it, is pretty scary stuff. Molly is like a breath of fresh, western air. She writes the serious stuff, but she does it with razor sharp wit, and a lot of raucous laughter and you get the point. She says, "I believe politics is the finest form of entertainment...better than the zoo, better than the circus... Becoming a fan of this arcane art form will yield a body endless joy -- beside, they make you pay for it whether you enjoy it or not."

On approaching the 1992 election, "The Citizen Who Does Not Vote Loses His Right to Complain...Besides, voting freshens your breath, improves your sex life and prevents unsightly hair loss." And after it was over, "All in all, it's been a glorious election. From the day Clinton said he never inhaled to George Bush's debate with the guy in the chicken suit, it's been one thrill after another." Right on, Molly. Keep on laughin'