An Answer - What Happened To That Piece You Promised Us?

The saying is that this country was founded by geniuses so it could be run by idiots (and it often seems we've reached that pass).

Molly Ivins, November 11, 1999

Molly Ivins died in 2007, while George W. Bush was in office, she wrote that while Bill Clinton was president and Newt Gingrich was succeeded by Denny Hastert as Speaker of the House.  What she'd make of 2017 isn't hard to guess.

During her lifetime I wouldn't have stood second to anyone in my admiration of her but I think her faith in the ability to maintain democracy in the face of modern methods of lying in the modern media and with the fascists having access to computer technology and sophisticated data was entirely misplaced.  The fact is, democracy dies when the media lies and gets away with lying, it was already how we came to that pass in 1999, it has only gotten worse.   Somewhere, I can't locate it just now, I wrote a piece disagreeing with her on her faith in "free speech absolutism" because I'd already come to believe that democracy can't happen when billionaires can flood the nation's collective attention span with lies.  I believe I pointed out that, as a professional writer, Molly Ivins' and other journalists' affection for the right to lie, to print untruths (either believed or almost certainly known to be lies) had more than a bit of sacrificing the need of The People to know the truth to cast an informed vote to their professional advantage.  It's not as if seeing Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I and II elected on the power of lies, of seeing Newt Gingrich prosper on lies, of seeing Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and hate talk radio doing the same thing and their elevation to power which all of the "more speech" that could be mustered didn't prevent wasn't obvious.

We have breached the limits of tolerance in which democracy can exist, those weren't set by the "genius" founders, they were largely a bunch of slaveholder crooks in the South and commerce crooks in the North and under the central group represented by such people as Madison and Hamilton, they set up the country so it could be rigged to favor them.   I'm still planning on getting back to that because the central mythology of the country, of the Constitution and, yes, the Bill of Rights - under which, I'll point out, genocide against the native people of North America happened, the enslavement and de facto enslavement under Jim Crow flourished and, with the attacks on the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, Republican fascists, the crook class of today, are trying their best to revive everything that was wrong with the original Constitution and the slave dominated country that document set up.   As one of the Black abolitionists pointed out at the time of the Civil War,  Black people had been slaves the entire time the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had been law.  Within ten years of the Emancipation Proclamation and as the Civil War amendments were in place, American Apartheid flourished for almost another century and those are being reinstalled by Republicans in the wake of Brown vs. Board and the long ago Supreme Court rulings that are being gutted. 

I have of late - and wherefore I know damned well—lost all my mirth

The folksy, jokey view of lies, as a minor fertilizer of humor, the kind of thing that Mark Twain wrote in his "My First Lie And How I Got Out Of It" one of his many pieces that don't stand up to time  isn't really very funny.  I've got a hard time believing anyone really thought it was ever funny.  I've stopped finding it amusing.   I still love Molly Ivins and frequently go back and read her columns, collected and those not in collections.   But this year I'm finding the humor about mendacity,  corruption and racism and bigotry pretty hard to take.  I don't know how people ever figured that kind of thing damaged the fascists, because if humor could overturn them, Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert and Seth Myers would have sent them packing by March.   Any week they tell more good jokes than the entire stand up community of the 50-and 60s told during those two decades and it's only getting worse.  If anyone is going to stop it, it's going to be the very unfunny Robert Mueller. 

What I want now isn't jokes, it's him with witnesses under oath and under threat of prison being compelled to tell the truth.  Only, the media will probably do their best to limit the effect of the truth with Constitutionally protected lies.