Unintentional ASMR - Molly Ivins (Texas Accent) - Interview - Corrupted US Politics/Being A Texan

molly ivins where did you get the title you got to dance with them what brung you is one of the oldest sons in politics you got to dance with them what bronya and what it means is that when you get to par when you get to office when you get to public office you vote with the folks who put you there and that used to mean your constituents the people who voted for you but more and more what it means is you vote with the special interests who put up the money to get you to public office and part of what this book is about is the corruption of the american political system by money it's not as though american politics had ever been pristine and pure of course not money has always been there but money nowadays is the dominant factor by such an enormous margin that i think it is making not just a qualitative but not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference in american politics it's a pickup truck it's just a picture of me and a pickup truck is that a are you actually sitting in a pickup truck sure where'd you take it i'm down in austin texas right near where i live i drive a pickup truck myself but that is not my pickup truck that's an old one they love some kind of texas connection they always like to put something up on the cover that reminds people that i'm a texan what does it mean to be a texan well good lord there's a question um i think my own feeling is that texans are just like everybody else only more so uh that there is a slight quality of exaggeration there's slightly larger than life pie-eyed quality about the whole state that makes it a lot of fun i love to tease lubbock it's out in west texas and it's just uh as flat as pancake and i must say to the uninitiated eye it does not appear to be one of the world's more attractive cities but that's because you don't know the people there they are just as straightforward and open-hearted and good as they can be you write in your column this is a series of well i count 70 columns i believe that's right you write in your column about lubbock in my rearview mirror perish the thought for instance one of the local television stations just ran a three-part investigative series on pantyhose called born to run is that true of course it's true you can't make up stuff like that and you never need to make up anything in texas because bizarre and strange things just always happen as a matter of course and what's the difference between west texas and east texas ah east texas is the very southern part of the state in fact i sometimes think that east texas is more like the old south than the old south is anymore about 50 percent of the population there is black it was plantation cotton farming part of this part of the state but west texas is a totally different kettle of fish it's the dry ranching part of the state of a lot of their fair number of hispanics that in west texas were and in south texas now they're the majority but that looks the western part of the state looks more like what you would think of texas in a cowboy movie bob bullock bob bullock the national politician of texas he is a piece of work he is the lieutenant governor of the state of texas uh he's been around since god was a pup he was uh before he was like gov he was a state comptroller and under our constitution like most southern states we have a weak governor's system so that the lieutenant governor is the guy who really has the crowd and bob bullock is one of the smartest shrewdest toughest and sometimes meanest politicians i have ever known he's a remarkable piece of work you have a couple what you call drinking stories and areas yeah he's been sober for quite some time he went to whiskey school out in california many years ago but before that he was a roar and uh he drank just enormous amount and as people who drink a lot uh do he would uh not infrequently get himself into trouble and one time uh one of his early wives he used to get married a lot too um kicked him out of the house we assumed for good cause and he went over to stay with a friend of his but his friend wasn't turned out drinking bob couldn't get into that apartment but he spotted his friend's car in the alley behind the apartment so he opened the back door and crawled into the back seat and fell asleep in the back seat of the car he woke up the next morning and the car was being driven down the highway by a total stranger it was not his friend's car at all and there was bob in the back seat thinking about how to handle this and apparently he just sat bolt upright and said to the into the driver's ear hi there i'm bob bullock your secretary of state is that a true story that's a true story he's still lieutenant governor he's still lieutenant again what do you think of the whole business first of all politically incorrect um i think it's much ado about nothing um the idea that somehow this is uh some kind of police come down upon you if you use words that are offensive i think it's nonsense it seems to me that political correctness was uh is maybe just an attempt to codify good manners or kindness you don't go around using words that offend people if you have any sense at all on the other hand um to prissy up language seems to me always a mistake i like language that's strong and earthy and vigorous and salty i like to use the full range of the english language you say that bullock calls feminists quote them harry legged women hairy-legged women them hairy-legged women but you say he's also good on women's issues he is so can you do people excuse people when they're on the right side in texas i think of necessity we have a larger tolerance for um for politicians who are not politically correct i mean we could wait a long darn time before we found one who always spoke as we wanted lumper jawed wamperjaw that just left him one for jaw that means with his mouth not only open staring in amazement but some amazing kind of like you could say of a suitcase when you mess up the lid to the body of the suitcase your suitcase is wamperjawed it means just astonished left him whomper job did you have my mouth hanging over oh no well it's no texas word slime balls slime balls well it seems to me that that is a word in great general use and a useful word it is because there are many of them hanging around people with no ethics no integrity just total slime balls good on you good on you that's that's another old texas expression good on you you can even say it it's it's approbation it's um it's uh encouragement you're doing right you wrote a comment about ann richards said good on you yeah why yeah well she was uh had been defeated at that point she uh lost uh the governorship to george w bush and i wrote a column about the four years she was in office and uh it's my judgment that ann richards was an awfully good governor and uh so i think i closed that column by saying good on you what makes you a good governor well as i say in our state we have the weak governor system so that really not a great deal is required of the governor not necessarily know much or do much and we've had a lot of governors who did neither and i think was one of our more effective governors although in the odd way of american politics i'm not sure i could point to a whole lot that she actually got done it was mostly a matter of keeping bad things from happening one of the main reasons she lost the governorship was because she vetoed the concealed handgun bill and we've got a bunch of gun nuts in texas who are bound to determine that they should be able to march around with uh concealed weapons what's a gun nut somebody who loves guns loves guns think that that's just the most important thing in the whole world you ever know one no lots of them and what do they like their people look crazy about guns um i have never um i don't hunt myself but i i sure do know a lot of people who do and i've never thought especially in a in a state like texas where there's an awful lot of outdoors that it's ridiculous to try and take away long guns but i've never seen any use in it you know in a society that is what are we now at least 70 percent urban what is the point of a handgun what's the point of letting people have handguns that's just endless tragedy after endless tragedy because of these things they've been little machines designed to do nothing but kill people and the amount of people in this number of people in this country who get liquored up or have no sense to begin with get furiously angry and go and kill one another i just think it's ridiculous you use the word gunman m-m-i-t gunmen that's the way texans say government that government you know we've got to get the government off our backs got to get the government off you know that's the way people talk i just write the way people talk i don't invent this stuff what about business b.i.d goodness that's exactly the way texans say the word business business they all say all texans talk that way when i'm i'm not sure i could say all anymore we've got a lot of texans we've moved in from somewhere else but almost anyone who's a native will say that venice now what about some some is not uh a dirty word in texas it's not like s.o.b uh a sumbitch is the texas word for fella or guy well he's a good old son and then they added some said to me he said and there's no there's no offense intended snurk boy i don't even remember snur yeah he calls somebody i'll get it right sometimes i do make up words actually yeah you said uh be still in my heart the single most trans transcendent moment of a lifetime covering politics occurred tuesday night and you poor snarks in television land missed it luckless fellows you luckless fellows did you make that word out i did make that word out nuthatch oh well not hatch is a fine insult um referring to uh someone being a little bit loosely wrapped you know when you write about texas politics it is necessary to find words that are highly descriptive garbanzo brains yeah garbanzo brains right bean brains tiny tiny tiny brains what's a garbanzo bean it's a bean it's a bean who ever started using that because that's that's i've heard that for years garbanzo i don't know how about kazuni's gazoonies in other words i'll tell you the the uh need you have for descriptive terms for stupid when you write about texas politics is practically infinite now i'm not claiming that our state legislature is dumber than the average state legislature but it tends to be dumb in such an outstanding way it's again that texas quality of exaggeration and being slightly larger than life and there are a fair number of people in the texas legislature um of whom it can fairly be said if dumb was dirt they would cover about an acre and um i'm not necessarily opposed to that i agree with an old state senator who always said that if you took all the fools out of the legislature it would not be a representative body anymore you say and i wrote a bunch of quotes down from your columns anyone who doesn't make enemies in office isn't worth spit that's right seems to me if you're going to do something if you're really going to get something done you're going to tick somebody off pretty seriously and i am more and more persuaded that politics itself is the art of finding that thin tiny sliver of daylight in the huge wall of obstruction that prevents anything from getting done about anything i live in austin texas the state capitol since uh let's see this go around since about 85 86. i had lived in austin earlier uh i was editor co-editor of the texas observer back in the 70s i'm from east texas originally i went to high school in houston texas how did you get interested in journalism well i sort of fell into it backwards uh when i was coming up about the only talent i ever showed aside from basketball which looked like it would be pretty hard to make 11 doing that was for writing and i loved to read and my only interest my big interest love besides literature was politics so i sort of fell naturally backwards into journalism combined writing in politics and there you are with journalism well where did the politics come from well my first political involvement was in the civil rights movement where i came along at a time when if you were young and idealistic and in the south that was you pretty much were drawn to that but what got you interested in that what kind of what was the home like my family is quite conservative my father is uh i would say extremely conservative yes he is my mama bless her heart um passed on i sometimes think it may have been my mother's fault my mother tried she she would certainly uh assure you without success to drill good manners into my head and in some ways i think that manners are just a formal expression of how you treat people and in the way black people were treated before the civil rights movement it was clear to me was very wrong it was an easy call were they political conservatives ideological conservatives your parents yeah um both republicans lifelong you write a column about your mom it's the last thing in the book i think my mama was ditzy there's no question about it she truly was she was absent-minded she was uh fuzzy about the practical details of life too and and and it was of course it made for some hilarious stories and we love to tease her well you're right that she was also lazy yep a horrible housekeeper horrible hair escaper somewhat depressive and addicted to soap operas but hey nobody's perfect um well if my my mother had her druther so she would not be up and bustling about doing things she enjoyed people she was an absolute charmer how many of uh of you were there three kids and my sister is now teaching school in albuquerque new mexico my brother's a lawyer in bernie texas you wrote in the book you said she went on to smith northampton massachusetts where her mother had gone before her and i went in my turn and then you have a little parentheses i know this is so wasp i'm about to urge myself can you imagine anything anything more wasp than your grandmother your mother and yourself all haven't gone to the same room what about smith smith it's a good school what'd you learn there what what impact did having you um i really do think i got a good education at smith i was uh not i'm not one of those people who thinks of my college years as a happy golden time i mean i was a texan who was up in massachusetts first of all i was cold freezing to death the whole time i was up there and i found yankees rather in some ways chilly and difficult compared to the texans i was used to but i do think i got off the good education what'd you study grateful for history my major was history and how long do you spend the new york times as a reporter six years with the new york times um some of it in new york it's a political reporter at city hall in albany and then later as bureau chief out in the rocky mountains would you take a little time and tell us about reporting on the funeral of elvis presley ah now there is something that uh when i've been standing in the checkout line at the grocery store and if i really need to impress people i just let fall that i covered elvis's funeral and uh boy people just practically draw back with awe it may yet turn out to be my greatest claim to fame um i was sitting in the new york city times one day when i noticed a whole lot of editors up around the desk uh having a great scrum of concern you could tell it looked sort of like an ant hill that had just been stepped on and it turned out the new york times has a large obituary desk and they prepare obituaries for anybody of prominence who might croak but it turns and you may recall that elvis presley died untimely and they were completely unprepared now this is an enormous news organizations they have rock music critics and classical music critics and opera critics but they didn't have anybody who knew about elvis presley's kind of music so they're looking across a whole acre of reporters and you could see them decide aha ivan's she talks funny she'll know about mr presley so i wound up writing elvis's obituary for the new york times i had to refer to him throughout is mr presley it was agonizing that's the style at the new york times mr presley give me a break and the next day they sold more newspapers than they did uh after john kennedy was assassinated so that even the editors of the new york times who had not quite you know been culturally attuned tuned to elvis decided that we should send someone to report on the funeral and now i drew that assignment what a scene it was you you say in the book that you got in the cab and you said take me to graceland the cabbie peels out of the airport during 80 and then turns full around to the back seat and draws ain't it a shame elvis had to die while the shriners are in town that's exactly what he said shame ever said die while the trainers turned down and i kind of raised my eyebrows and sure enough i realized what what he meant after i had been there for a while because you know shriner's in convention i don't know if you've ever seen a whole lot of shriners in convention but they were having a huge national convention that very week in memphis and they tend to wear their little red fizzes and sometimes they drink too much and they uh march around the hotel hallways tooting on new year's eve horns and riding those funny little tricycles and generally cutting up and having a good time that's your shriners in convention always something very edifying and enjoyable to watch but they by every every hotel room in memphis was occupied with uh celebrated shriners and then elvis dies and all these tens of thousands of grieving hysterical elvis presley fans descend on the town so you got a whole bunch of sovereign hysterical helves fans you got a whole bunch of kvorten shriners and on top of that they were holding a cheerleading camp and uh the cheerleading camp i don't know if you're memory with the the ethos of the cheerleading camp but the deal is that every school sends its team of cheerleaders to cheerleading camp and your effort there at the camp is to win the spirit stick which looks to the uninitiated eye a whole lot like a broom handle painted red white and blue but it is the spirit stick and should your team win it for three days running you get to keep it but that has never happened and the way you earn the spirit stick is you show most spirit you cheer for breakfast lunch and dinner you cheer when the pizza man brings the pizza you do handsprings and over in down the hallway to the bathroom i tell you those young people will throw show an amount of spirit that would just astonish you in an effort to win that stick so here i was for an entire week dealing with these three groups of people the young cheerleaders trying to win the spirit stick the cavorting shriners and the grieving hysterical elvis fans and i want to assure you that the new york times is not the kind of newspaper that will let you write about that kind of rich human comedy because the new york times at least in my day was a very stuffy pompous newspaper what about today a little bit better a little bit better than it was and has it has it has a tendency recidivist tendencies though you you will notice if you read the time why did you leave it well um i i actually got into trouble at the new york city times for describing a community chicken killing out west as a gang pluck a rosenthal was then the editor of the times and he was not amused but did they let it go did they like it oh no it never made it in the paper good heavens no such thing with never getting the times in my day and so what happened oh um i was just sort of put on the on the uh on the s list we used to call it at the times the shitless what the hell these people are grown-ups and and what happened then well it just i decided that i didn't have enough time in my life to waste uh trying to get off the new york times list over a silly thing like that and i got a call from the dallas times herald and what they said was come home and we will give you absolute freedom you can write whatever you want about whatever you want to and you can say whatever you want to and you know in the newspaper business it doesn't get a lot better than that did they ever interfere with it that dallas time zone almost never almost never and and uh if they changed anything i would they would bring it to me and i would look at it and say you're absolutely right let's change that you know i noticed i was reading the the the chapter on dumped by disney which is about the fort worth star teller telegram for which i now work and in there you have this quote you said trouble is that the news business is rapidly becoming one big plantation i'm looking over the list of potential bidders the same way they're looking over us meaning who's going to buy the fort worth star telegram by the way since you've gone there and how long have you been there um since 1990. how many times has it been sold three times that's a that's not at all unusual in our business these giant media corporations keep merging and merging and and you keep getting bought by somebody else and somebody else right below this you're right uh newhouse is on the list murray kempton once observed i think sy newhouse has lost his moral compass since roy cohn died what do you mean by that the single meanest line i ever heard said about anybody roy cohn the late roy cohn was in my opinion one of the most despicable human beings who ever lived he was a a ruthless lawyer and a shameless human being and i know that he has friends still living but i'm i'm entitled to my opinion too i think roy cohn was one of the most despicable people who ever lived and he was in fact cy house's lawyer the lawyer of this great magnate this uh media magnate new house well the reason i brought it up is i want to ask you is sign new house owns the book company that published your book that's right do you ever worry about putting that in there that they might not publish it no i never worry about biting the hand that feeds me i'm you know i realize that's an old saying but um i think you're much better off telling the truth why would you know why i've never worried about offending the powers that be anybody interfere with you at the fort worth star telegram ever same same like um i'll deal with the times harold they we we just if they have a problem they bring it to me and i almost always agree that whatever they think needs to be changed needs to be changed but it rarely happens in your book one of the columns is about berkeley when did you go to berkeley last year 1997 i got to teach at the university of california at berkeley um just for one quarter and it was the first time i ever really taught and i loved it you call the place a lunatic comedy oh well of course i'm gonna make fun of it i mean berkeley california if you are from texas it's just hilarious why well of course it is just the absolute center of liberalism and political correctness and it is a veritable hotbed of people of um brush their hearts who all think alike in a liberal way and of course i'm sometimes called a liberal myself and you would think i would have felt right at home there but i just i am so used to so used to texas that i found the culture of berkeley hysterical you're right personally i think living in berkeley is like dwelling with hobbits any day now i expect to catch them hiding their furry little feet inside their birkenstocks they are so kind and gentle they are they all care they help the homeless they are proud of their eccentrics two of the most notable people in town are the naked man and the pink man what's that mean who are they well they are local characters there in berkeley one guy walks around with no clothes on he's the naked man and the other guy wears nothing but pink it is just he wears nothing but pink and everybody knows him there's the pink man it's the kind of community where people like that are rather relished and cherished explain what this means here i expect to kiss them hiding their furry little feet inside their birkenstocks the hobbits oh the birkenstocks are those those famous uh sandals that um they're they're good for your feet um they're they're not fashion sandals they're they're they're kind of squat looking uh sandals that uh hippies and people uh people with foot trouble wear and of course berkeley being full of people who are far too sensible to ruin their feet by walking around in high heels there are a lot of folks who wear those sandals there so what did you find in the classroom very very bright people um i was really pleased i had thought like many people in our business i've been sort of grumpy about young people coming into journalism recently because it seems to me we've gotten an awful lot of ambitious little careerists and i keep looking at them and thinking myself damn why didn't they go into investment banking but the the students i found at berkeley were not just bright but idealistic to a remarkable degree what are they going to find once they get into the business well they're going to have some of it ground out of them there's no question about that um but it's my hope that they'll stay with it long enough to make a difference why why will they have it ground out of them well part of it is an old tradition in the newspaper business as is true in many others there is a sort of tradition that i i call it the marine corps mentality you know listen to the sun i eat chip when i was young and you can do it too it'll make a man out of you it'll put hair on your chest i mean the idea that you should somehow uh as part of making someone pay their dues put them through a bad time and i think it's a terrible mistake one of the things we still do in the newspaper business is take bright talented idealistic young people and give them the world's worst most boring assignments we make the right obituaries or some boring thing why not take them and put them immediately on some big series where they you could use all that energy and idealism um i've always thought that was a mistake the way we treat young people in our business and it's true in a lot of fields you list one two three four five six seven eight words and then you say hold on and then you go on to write sentences for each one of them prick ass breast and what all of which of course are legitimate words used in in one context and and then in another context have connotations that are either vulgar language or or let me give the audience an idea what you're talking about here's a sentence you use this needle and prick all those balloons so we can take this needle and prick all those balloons so we can finish cleaning up then another one you have here according to the bible mary wrote on an ass into bethlehem another line it was all those bases on balls that cost us the game in other words you take those words and put them in a sentence where people weren't offended yeah and um it's funny people will get upset at what they they think is vulgar language forgetting that words often have dual meanings and what i was that the reason i made that point in the column is because i do think that context is everything and this was in in a column about criticism and indeed censorship of a television program from which snippets had been taken that made it look as though it was some you know very prurient salacious program when actually it was a very fine and intelligent program what got you in the interested in writing about robert magnum mcnamara's book in which he essentially apologized for vietnam and admitted that it was a terrible mistake had just come out and what interested me was the reaction there were an extraordinary number of people who sort of refused to accept mcnamara's apology and i am of the vietnam generation it was a war i oppose uh very strongly it's one of the most horrible events in the entire history of this nation mistake is a word that barely covers that tragedy but it seemed to me impossible not to accept and recognize mcnamara's finally painfully having come to the realization of not only having been wrong but the terrible cost of having been there wrong what do you think of him robert strange mcnamara that middle name was always telling i thought um i thought it was brave of him and right of him to have written that book and that he deserves to be commended for it i think that vietnam was a terribly destructive episode and i'm it's interesting to me as somebody who was young in the 60s to hear now the constant references to the 60s as those sex drugs and rock and roll were the only things that happened i was very like many young people in the 60s i was very political and as far as i was concerned the 60s were about first the civil rights movement and then the anti-war movement um and i miss sex drugs and rock and roll entirely damn what a fool um but it was a time i thought of great idealism and then when when uh the country got dragged into vietnam i think it dragged a lot of people into despair and cynicism and nihilism because it was just so stupid you say that you have lessons that have been learned from all this don't lie don't mind how much of that's going on today a lot certitude is the enemy what do you mean i think that if you are in a position of political leadership and you don't question yourself um you're apt to go very wrong i think a becoming degree of self-doubt is one of the best qualities we can look for in leaders yeah you say self-doubt is good then you say particularly difficult lessons in a nervous age when the search for certainty compels so many yeah i think a lot of people are looking for certainty they are very very uncomfortable with the idea that things are never going to be cut and dry that there's never going to be a set of rules that always apply down here at the very bottom it says current affairs slash humor if you had to pick one of those which one would you pick first um i'd pick humor of course why um well i do think it's important and i do try to write about politics in a way that makes people laugh now there's two reasons for that one is politics is intrinsically funny and that and this should be noted and appreciated by all um and second i think it's important we in in a time when people so look down on politics that are so reluctant to get involved or even learn very much about it yeah i constantly hear people say things like and politics they're all crooks who cares damn very dismissive and it seems to me that in part that's because people who write and report about politics make it so boring i mean you read those newspaper articles that start house bill 327 was passed out a subcommittee by a unanimous vote on tuesday i've seen reporters time and again take all the juice and joy and life and comedy and drama and humanity and excitement out of politics they just ring it all out and what they leave you with is this dried set of lifeless fact that has nothing to reflect at all the the whole splendid panorama that is politics july 4th 1995. you like to write july force columns yeah like every every time we have a birthday in this country i sort of write a column celebrating us i like to do that in 95 you said i am a longtime fan of our national habit of pulling ourselves to find out how dumb we are isn't this wonderful we do that all the time is that such a comic thing for people to do well why do we do it because we're funny people this i have another line i underlined this is far more interesting than living in canada where the national motto is now let's not get excited i swear that's true i've been up to canada that is their national motto now let's not get excited i was up there one time when they were having a national election that was practically a revolution they threw out the party that was in power they completely took off a party that had been there forever practically disappeared a whole new set of folks came in and all the commentators were there on election nights saying now let's not get excited later in that calm you said we're the country that put elvis on a stamp by the way did you did you like elvis presley was it well of course we buy pink lemonade and striped toothpaste and as we wish our country happy birthday endeavor to recall two things one most americans really are much nicer people than we often give ourselves credit for being and two the pursuit of happiness was an 18th century locution for the search for justice and right yeah um i think those are both important things one is that and i think it's the fault of people in our business brian the media presents such a negative picture where we're just so relentlessly negative i don't think it's that the media are left-wing or right-wing but they are negative and that's partly the nature of the world if you've ever noticed that uh the world news is always worse than the national news and the national news is always worse than the state news and the state news is always worse than the local news and local news is always worse than whatever has happened in your neighborhood that day well of course the world is pretty much like your neighborhood the whole world is pretty much like your neighborhood not much horrible ever happens there but the news business so focuses on the bizarre the disastrous and the unusual that people get the sense that the world out there is much more dangerous and dark than it actually is well it's full of nice folks and then my second point in that piece about the pursuit of happiness people sometimes think that the pursuit of happiness is um you know somehow it's written in the constitution that we all have a right to go off on a great search for self-fulfillment and satisfaction and frisks and jollification actually that's about looking for a way to find justice you say the nicest people in america are in minnesota i believe that it to be absolutely true now minnesotans are a little tired of being called nice understandably so they sort of wince but the truth is they're all the nights in minnesota but you wrote a column from the mall there what about like the pyramids of ancient egypt like the coliseum of ancient rome we have the mall of america did you when did you go there i been a couple of years now what an amazing place what a what a great temple to consumption that is what did you see oh there's a world of stuff at the mall of america you just hardly would not believe it there's the entire stores that sell nothing but barrettes and hair bows there's stores that sell nothing but different kinds of popcorn you would not believe the variety of stuff there is in this world why are we such a consumer nation well now there's a good question um it's partly uh because uh you know in the capitalist system they push you to consume and an enormous amount of time money and skill is spent persuading us to buy things like pink lemonade and striped toothpaste which are not exactly basic necessities in this world the amount of money spent on a single television ad is frequently a 30-second ad frequently costs more than the entire 30-minute program surrounding the ad what are the kind of columns that you hear from people by letter or email i know you you wrote here one where somebody appended a copy of a column and i called you a commie lover is that was it lover yeah i get a lot of those why um there are certain topics i used to sort of say well there are certain topics that sort of rattle their cages you're always going to hear from the haters if you write about death penalty abortion um try to think of some others there's a series of of subjects that just always touch off the nut cases and then i thought about it again and i thought gosh it's practically everything i like touches them off oh yeah gays homosexuals that that sets them off too and they actually had a quote that you wrote where you said that uh where is it god gays and guns are always good for some excitement you bet i'll tell you what if you want to stir things up and uh get people screaming you to bring up god gazing guns in my state now you talk about conservatives in here on occasion and you say mean as hell with hideoff conservatives mean it's hell with a hat off yeah that's a certain kind what kind is that just teeth rattling mean meaner than a skillet for morales thinks and how do you know they're making when we have them down in texas because they'll do things that are gratuitously cruel in the name of conservatism like you know cut milk for children or something that it just makes no sense fiscally why did they do it because they're mean do you think they get up that way every day they just there is it's it's always hard for me to identify the uh you know i think this is true on the liberal side too but the the legitimate thoughtful philosophical consistent conservatism and there are a lot of conservatives i admire i really do both both political jim kilpatrick seems to me to be a very thoughtful conservative the writer james oh jack james jackson yeah yeah um i find him consistently thoughtful and um and a very principled person and i understand that political point of view but to me we've been getting more and more uh people to the right of people that i always thought were very conservative like kilpatrick and barry goldwater now we've got people the right of them who seem to think that that government should be used in a punitive way against poor people i mean it's not just that they're opposed to welfare it's like let's really make sure these people never get a chance to get anywhere like it's just so mean-spirited and i don't think most people are like that which conservative makes your skin crawl the most when you hear them see them talk to them read them um jesse helms sets me off pretty bad i just find him a mean-spirited person phil graham there's another one he sees there's something in addition to the mean-spiritedness there's a kind of smarminess about graham that i find distasteful but then i don't like him some people do congressman tom delay from oh now now we're talking about my favorite trio of bozos um they are tom delay dick army and bill archer are these three powerful republican congressmen from texas and i must say of the three delay is probably the only one who uh sometimes you do have to question that man's sense like what oh he one of his ideas is that we should bring back ddt he's he's one of those people who thinks that uh environmentalism is is a non nonsensical and pernicious thing he used to be a bug exterminator in sugarland texas that's what he did for living he exterminated bugs does he know you don't care for him oh yeah sure he was in the texas legislature for a while he wasn't i never thought he was that bad when he was in the legislature he seemed like a sort of regular vanilla republican but it certainly has taken on some strange coloration in washington you refer to uh bill clinton as maybe chauncey gardner who is chauncey gardner he's a figure in a film called being there who is an opaque person into whom other people read whatever they want in this figure the chauncey gardner guy conservatives think he's conservative liberals think he's a liberal um you know um people read into him whatever they want to see there and there is a touch of that about bill clinton what do you read into him i think he's a politician and i say that i may be one of the last people left in america who does not use that word as a pejorative actually let me quote what you say about him you say he's the most skilled politician i've ever watched work i like to watch politicians work remember when i was talking earlier about the art of politics being able to find this little thin sliver that allows you to get something done well it gets harder and harder to get anything done about anything because our politics have gotten to be so head buddy and and uh people just going against one another out of knee-jerk reaction rather than concentrate on fixing a problem and clinton is good and by that i mean he can find a way to get things done it's not necessarily the solution he'll finally get through may not be the best way to fix the problem may not be the most efficient or least costly but it is the politically doable way and that's that's a great skill that's actually a great art anything about him you don't like sure um he's a politician you know like all politicians he's a compromiser and in my opinion he compromises far too easily and far too often he'll often give away nine tenths of the loaf just to get one slice seems to me you ought to hold out for at least half now for whatever reason in the last six months we happened to have interviewed alice rivlin and donna schiller on this network and i know donna had a book party for you here in this town but in each case they talk about the hiking that goes on and then you're in that group there is a bunch of people almost all of us women but a couple of men go along too and we have been for many years now take an outdoor wilderness adventure trips together and it started back in 1980 when a bunch of us did a whitewater raft trip out in idaho and every year that group that group it'll it shifts some some years so some people can't go and other people come in it's not not exactly the same crowd every time but uh a bunch of us who uh i think when we started doing this nobody was particularly important or any kind of a big cheese we were uh 20 years ago we were just young and funny and and enjoyed one another and we got to where we we'd almost every summer we'd go and on a trek in the himalayas or climb machu picchu or take a kayak trip work in alaska or we've done all kinds of wonderful things together and real we really do have an awfully good time what's the value of all that it is sheer fun uh you might think that you know with say heavy hitters members of the cabinet and this kind of thing on all along on a trip that we would sit around having deep philosophical conversations or weighty policy discussions we revert to being complete 13 year olds on this trip we just giggling really silly almost always they they take them start taking themselves quite seriously about your friends you go hiking with anybody they're still teasable they're still teasable you see a change yeah i do not more in donna than alice rivlin alice rivlin seems to me to have been to be a wonderfully consistent human being i think donna donna is the same good person she always was and she's trying to i think everything that she tries to do is good i mean i think on the policies idea but of course she is remarkably effective in government but i see um seeing donna a um i guess it's just used to being used to dealing with people in your daily life who are household names in the rest of the country sometimes you get the impression that she's so used to dealing with big names and big people and important people um that maybe she's not hanging out enough time with people of no particular distinction but great delight my opinions are uh sort of on the left side of political spectrum i consider myself a populist rather than a liberal but i'm not worth crawling over what's that mean a populist a populist is somebody who sees politics more from an economic perspective than an ideological perspective i often argue that i don't think politics is a spectrum that runs from right to left it's a scale that runs from top to bottom and i think the only real political questions are who's getting screwed and who's doing this grilling paul wellstone also gives you a nod in the back of the book molly ivan's insists on integrity and honesty and politics does that compromise you that he now has said nice things about you afraid to everyone ah that that does i've i've often wondered uh in fact i'm glad my publisher called him and asked him for the blurb and that i didn't i think it's bad policy for a journalist to owe a politician i really do jim hightower's on here too yeah thank you jesus he says here comes molly with another power pack volume to cure what ails us you friends yeah oh yeah same kind of politics oh yeah jim is one of the great texas populists you know the populism started uh in texas i mean that's where the movement first came out of that thin stony soil in the central hill country of texas and for years we had wonderful populist representatives wright patman in congress and sam rayburn ralph yarbrough in the senate and the best texas politics were politicians were always at least part populist but it's we i don't think we have anyone in public office anymore who really counts it's a true populist one line in here where you say the oil companies bought lyndon johnson sure they did he carried water for the oil companies in the 1950s constantly he was the senator from texas oil when he was in the senate there's a story or a column in the progressive about the lord oh yes the the lord impersonation problem this has worried me considerably now can you go back and set the scene on why you wrote and by the way you write for the nation the progressive and the fort worth star telegram in here right i'm very fond of writing for small progressive magazines that pay in the high two figures this is the kind of fiscal sanity that has made me the woman of great wealth that i am today this kid claiming to be god what happened was a bunch of folks from florida texas go back to that what's what's the name of the town floyd data data floyd texas it's up in the panhandle it's a particularly undistinguished town and a whole bunch of them believed that the lord had told them to get naked get in the car and drive to louisiana and they get as far as vinton louisiana and their car hits a tree and to the absolute astonishment of the people who saw it happen out of this car come about 20 naked people include a bunch of kids who were stuck in the back there was just quite a few of them squashed all in there together and they explained as they were standing there on the street in vent louisiana with their car drove into the tree that the lord had told them to do this which of course increased the astonishment of the police of vent louisiana even more and so i'm addressing this phenomenon by saying you know i do not believe it was the lord who told them to do that there is this fellow who runs around impersonating the lord and many times people will tell you god told me to do this but it's that fellow who impersonates the lord it's not the lord at all it's a real problem now you say that today's politicians are blow dried preggish goody two shoes suburban boars i find that all too often especially those guys have you noticed how often people who used to be television weathermen now run for public office they all have really good hair and no brains now i don't mean to put down weatherman as a class but i'm sure there are redeeming exceptions among the weathermen of the nation but i just am speaking of a common kind of weatherman i find more and more that people who go into politics seem to me to somehow they don't have much depth they don't have much fire they they um the lord only knows what makes them run you say i am the world's leading authority on blue bellied walleyed lithium-deprived texas lunatics there was a remarkable week in my life when a bunch of texas lunatics hold up out by fort davis texas and demanded that texas be allowed to secede from the rest of the country and it touched off quite a media storm around the world and as the resident authority on texas lunatics there i was getting telephone calls from places like bombay miss evans is bombay times calling can you explain please the people in the fort davis and i was yeah i can explain them they are just crazier than house rats

Channel: retox44

Views: 48,190

Rating: 4.8233619 out of 5

Keywords: unintentional, asmr, interview, molly, ivins, accent, texas, texan, southern, south, relax, relaxing, audio, sound, sounds, mouth, humor, funny, comedy, liberal, columnist, author, writer, book, you, got, dance, what, brung

Id: KwzYjHWDvfQ

Length: 51min 19sec (3079 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020