Molly

“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”

Did she ever. Molly Ivins died last Wednesday. If you've read her work, chances are you either love it or hate it. She was bursting with intelligence, outrage, and attitude. I happen to have agreed with 90 percent of her ideological views, so it was easy for me to appreciate the raw information that she so indelicately put across. Like any skilled journalist, she informed and entertained.

In my own moderate, middle-class, mostly polite, midwestern family, opinions run the gamut on such a big, loud woman with big, unashamed opinions and a writerly voice to match. Where I come from, ladies don't act like that. It's alright for big, fat men to blather lies about the kind of women they hate, in fact it's both socially acceptable and funny in a manly kind of way, don't you think? But, so goes this line of thinking, for a working woman to factually disrespect the Leaders of the Fatherland is just wrong.

If someone must question authority, well, let's leave that to the authorities. No, let's not. As one of the obits points out, her main contribution to public discourse was the gall to skewer the powerful, especially when it's popular and safe to skewer the powerless. Thank you, Molly, and rest in raising a ruckus.