I was going to get one of these* for lunch, and I walked by the NBC News LED ticker, and due to the spacing of the vertical bars and the fact that I was walking against the light, plus I was thinking of something else**, I thought at first it said "MOLLY IVINS, AUTHOR AND COMMUNIST, DEAD AT 62".***
As with most things, time and the whole quiet desperation thing have muted and blurred the irritating things about what it was like to live in Texas**** and enhanced the things that were really kind of great. This is a pretty big blow against the kind of great things list.
The Texas Observer has a page with a few tributes on it (including one from former governer and failed businessman GWB); reading it reminds you both that things continue to be stupid and suck, but also that there are people trying hard. We should all probably be trying harder.
* Oh my God, so much best. Midtown Lunch is doing the most important work in America right now. You know, other than the ACLU.
** I was amusing myself by imagining George Saunders characters singing Hole songs: "I want to be the girl with the most cake, due to I like cake?" (That's about as far as I got with that thought. Probably not much more I could do with it than that, I imagine.)
***For reals, it said "columnist" but for a second, it seemed totally plausible, both that that would be what the ticker was saying and that she had actually been an actual Communist, like one of my other muckraking iconoclast brain-crushes, Jessica Mitford: didn't I read that being a Populist is a gateway drug to Communism? Or is "Populist" just "Communist" without the beans?
**** Off the top of my head: there is a dearth of: (1) chicken tikka paratha; (2) tolerance (like I couldn't tell if this was real or not for a very long time; the line between hostile hypocritical religious nonsense and parody of same is a 250-pixel Gaussian blur of a photo of Occam's Razor, Photoshop stizz).
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