Could it be, I wondered ingenuously to Molly Ivins, that it's possible to have a different kind of experience of Texas?
"Oh Good God yes, you better come right back!" laughs the grandmotherly-looking political author from East Texas, with a throaty chuckle that sets her shock of white hair swaying. And yet in the next breath Ivins will insist that "pretty much everybody from East Texas is crazy", including U.S. President George W. Bush. He is the subject of her new book, Bushwhacked.
Ivins first met Bush when the two were teenagers, but they quickly parted company politically. Bush became what Ivins scornfully calls "a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America," while she became that rarest of creatures, a Texas liberal.
She also became an obsessive investigative journalist whose articles in the Texas Observer expose a political culture of cronyism and machismo.
Her outspokenness, and a series of bestselling books (the first was called Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?), made her a national figure now syndicated in 300 newspapers. In a media dominated by aggressive and sharp-tongued conservatives, she is a phrase-making attack liberal.
She says would-be California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like "a condom filled with walnuts." She describes Bush's tax cuts for the rich as an imitation of Ronald Reagan's voodoo economics -- "déja voodoo." She warned that the war in Iraq would be succeeded by "the peace from hell," and now loudly reminds the neo-conservatives that "I was right and they were wrong."
But in person her language is surprisingly moderate. Even where George W. Bush is concerned, she insists that he not be caricatured. She even allows that he has a human side.
"He's not mean and he's not stupid," says Ivins. "He's three strands of Texas: the religiosity, the anti-intellectualism and the machismo. Each of them appeals to a large group of voters. But then," she adds, "you must factor in a set of class blinkers."
It's because Bush can't see the world outside of the privileged elite into which he was born (his father, of course, was also a U.S. president, and a wealthy oil baron) that leads to some of his "appalling" decisions, says Ivins.
In her book she sets out the Bush policies, one by one, and then shows how they have destroyed the life of a particular individual. Bush cut back unemployment insurance, so now a single mother named Julia Jeffcoat must walk six miles to a $6.85 an hour job, leaving her children in dubious care, because otherwise she would get nothing. Bush cut back federal inspection of meat packing plants, so that inspectors are now ordered to let feces-smeared animals be slaughtered unless the feces have dried out: result, a retired doctor named Frank Niemtzow dies from eating processed meat.
Ivins contends that Bush has no understanding of these consequences. "It's only when he is exposed to suffering that he reacts like a feeling person. In 2000 he visited an alcohol rehab centre, and he was genuinely moved. Because of course he struggled with alcoholism, too."
But he doesn't get it about miseries he hasn't experienced. "He even said not long ago that he's just a white guy who doesn't get it about poor people, but he wishes he could."
One thing she's sure of, though, is that he never will get it. "And that's because he absolutely does not believe that public policy has an effect on people's lives. Policy bores the hell out of him."
Why do Americans keep electing people like this?
"I love my country, but I have to say that a lot of us are lazy and uninformed. Bush has this disconnect that he doesn't see what his policies are doing, but you get the same disconnect on the other side. Many of the people we wrote about [her co-author is journalist Lou Dubose] really don't understand that the government has caused their situations."
She also feels the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, has attracted far too much of America's attention. For this she blames the media. "The attacks were on New York and Washington, where most of the media are, so of course they went bleating that it was the end of the world. But within an hour I was hearing from media people on the west coast saying, "Hey, aren't they overdoing it?"
She believes it was not Bush, but rather the hard-eyed and amoral people behind him, who then exploited the tragedy. And she refuses to believe that the military attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq presage a new U.S. imperialism.
"I think that liberals like Michael Ignatieff are crazy to talk about 'empire lite.' That's not what this country is about. Maybe that sounds hokey," she adds impetuously, and then without hesitation recites the entire preamble to the Declaration of Independence, starting with "we hold these truths to be self-evident" and ending with "the right of the people to alter and abolish [their government]."
"People all over the world are willing to die for a shot at that idea," she concludes, with deep emotion.
She is particularly offended at the arrogance of the Bush government toward its allies. "I was distressed by the bad manners of the way Canada was treated in the run-up to Iraq. It was tacky."
Informed that Canadians like MP Carolyn Parrish who complained about it were told to be quiet, she replies: "That is just sickening. Tell them to yell louder."
Ivins is of course regularly denounced by professional polemicists on the right, which she enjoys. She is less thrilled when her hard research leads to "whatever" reactions like that of a reader: "Molly Ivins is very smart so we all say yes yes yes."
One liberal reviewer of Bushwhacked commented that he couldn't see the book "converting many diehard conservatives." He felt Ivins was trapped by its partisan format and by her penchant for "Texas patois" and "cute, down-home phrases."
It's true that Ivins, when writing, calls the oil business the "awl bidness" when she wants to mock the Texan old boys who talk like that (she speaks in standard, almost accentless English). She refers to Bush as "Geedubya" and does her best to be amusing while guiding the reader through thickets of political detail.
"But I don't want to write any other way," she protests. "There's a school of us who write with an irreverent tone. I personally take my inspiration from William Brann, a late-19th-century publisher in Waco. He was shot by an irate Baptist, but before he died he rolled over and pulled out a gun and shot his murderer to death.
"That's my kind of Texan."
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