Molly Ivins did say that, didn’t she?
Highlights from her Observer years
Molly wrote the column below upon her return to Texas in August, 1970, when she became co-editor of the Observer. She previously had spent three years with The Minneapolis Tribune working as a feature writer, police reporter, and covering movements for social change.
South toward home
August 21, 1970
Going back to Texas? Ivins, you’re out of your goddamn mind.
And they told me again all the things that make Minnesota a better place to live. The schools are better, the health care is better, the mental institutions more humane, the prisons more enlightened, and the courts more just. And also, Minnesota has bars.
And Minnesota’s newspapers are superior and its politicians are progressive and its climate no lousier and its laws more sane. And its racism is thin-blooded and polite. I can't help it. I love the state of Texas. It's a harmless perversion.
I love the gritty, down-on-the-ground quality of Texans, their love of a good yarn and the piss and vinegar of their speech, not yet watered down to Standard Television American. I enjoy that abiding interest in kin, even unto the in-laws of second cousins. And I like the pleasant open vulgarity of Texans. Honest vulgarity is so much nicer than affected gentility. And Texas ain’t genteel.
But there are rednecks down there, protested the Minnesotans, and the people are so crassly materialistic.
So. As Sinclair Lewis pointed out, there are yahoos in Sauk Centre and Babbitts in Duluth and what the hell difference does it make that they don’t speak with a Texas twang.
Saying all these comforting things to myself, I started my hegira home with all my worldly goods, two cats and a rubber plant in a teenage Mercury that doesn’t go backwards. Sort of like the littlest piggy, I worried, worried, worried all the way home. “Roots!” Berryman the poet had said scornfully. “What are you, a plant?”
Had I over-romanticized Texas? Again?
Two years before I had come home for a visit in an orgy of sentimentality. I’d been gone long enough to forget about Texans and football—not a game, but a matter of blood and death. I’d arrived in Austin the weekend of the Texas-Arkansas game to find 50,000 drunks running around town shrieking “Sooooooeeee, pig, pig, pig, pig.”
My brother had taken me forthwith to the pre-game party at the fraternity house. We drank. We went to the game. We drank. We went to the post-game party. We drank. And Andy finally located his “big brother” in the fraternity, one Reggie from Big Spring. It seemed that Ol’ Reg had never made it from the pre-game party to the game. He stayed at the house and drank right into the post-game party. By the time Andy got Reggie under one arm and me under the other to make the big introduction—his big sister to his “big brother”—Ol’ Reg was thoroughly juiced. He swayed a little, peered at me through an alcoholic haze, noticed I was female, reached over and grabbed my right breast and squeezed, saying, “Hieh!”
Right on, Southern gentlemen. I was going back to that?
I whipped across the border doing 80 and feeling queasy.
I have been gone long enough to be astonished at the familiar. The incredibly vast sky. The enveloping heat. Grown men who chew gum. Whitewall tires. Howdy. Grits. And folks who speak to you in public places just to be sociable. In the great cities of the north, any stranger who addresses you in a public place wants your money, your body, or your time.
I am home. And I’ve still got dung on my boots and Chidsey in my heart. (Alan Lake Chidsey, former grandmaster of St. John’s School in Houston, was much given to sermonizing during Wednesday morning chapel on School Spirit, Patriotism, and Episcopal Morality.)
I am home with an unholy rejoicing in my soul at being back here down on the ground.
Everyone in the state left of Grover Cleveland appears to be in normal disarray. Texas liberals, I once wrote in a particularly pretentious article at journalism school, eventually become either alcoholic or paranoiac. They start seeing Birchers under every bed the same way Birchers see Reds under every bed. They are also prone to fits of group depression. Alas, Yarborough. Alas, Silber. Who am I to make light of it?
But I must confess that I rather relish the political situation here, if only because there is no shortage of proper villains in Texas. The battles are so lifeless elsewhere, ever fought in tedious shades of gray. Down here the baddies wear black hats and we can loathe them with a cheerful conscience. Who can hate Hubert Humphrey? One might, in an access of passion, work up to despising him, but one can’t hate him.
Hatred is hardly a thing to take pride in, but I believe there is a difference between the anger of bitterness and despair and the anger of righteousness. The latter, when not wholly lacking in humor, is a just and cleansing thing. The battles here are battles worth fighting.
I find, as usual, fratricidal combat rampant among Texas liberals. It seems to have taken on a new dimension with the extension of the political spectrum leftward. Now even Texans are playing I-am-more-radical-than-thou.
And, as always, too many good people have left while too many others have left off trying.
It is true that there is much in the culture of Texas that is dehumanizing and oppressive. Perhaps the most sickening aspect of it to one long absent is the prevalence of physical violence. Overt violence is so common here and so at variance with the casual civility also peculiar to Texans. This is not a very civilized place.
But I believe that in the kindness of Texans, evidenced in their everyday courtesy toward one another, is a mine of civilization which can be worked to make this, at last, a place where people can grow up gentle. It is an effort worth making.