Small Favors
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins How to Survive Reagan Many citizens of progressive political persuasion are finding that, soul-wise, these are trying times. To be a liberal in the Reagan Era—not to...
...James Watt...
...Ketchup as a vegetable...
...You have to ignore a lot of stuff in order to laugh about Reagan—dead babies and such—but years of practice with the Texas Lege is just what a body needs to get in shape for the concept of Edwin Meese as Attorney General...
...H There is always the off-chance that adversity will improve our character...
...And then they have to pay a $13 billion bond to appeal the case...
...Beloveds, fear not, neither let yourselves despair...
...The rest of us toughen our stomachs by taking in the Legislature a day at a time...
...This is great stuff...
...We feel just like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer...
...I hardly ever heard of anything so awfully unfair as Texaco having an $11 billion judgment put against them when it wasn't even Texaco that screwed over Pennzoil in the first place...
...Since we are all the spiritual children of the Puritans, we secretly believe suffering is good for us...
...And may yet be...
...But then, as Gore Vidal recently observed in another context, one must never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor...
...11 A redundant reason to keep right on chortling through the Ronaldan Age is on account of lefties are more fun than right-ies by definition...
...Rejoice...
...Let us give thanks for Ed Meese while we yet have time...
...So smile...
...What's the point of doing good if you can't have fun doing it...
...Is there anything to cheer us in the realization that Ed Meese is Attorney General...
...It could have been Jesse Helms...
...But crying and throwing up are bad for you, so you might as well laugh...
...Mike Zunk is a fellow we used to know who tried to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by eating a car—ground up, you understand, a small bit at a time...
...You will learn therein that things back then were also terrible, and what's more, they were always getting worse...
...Actually, you have two other choices...
...Killer trees...
...Duty requires the earnest liberal to spend most of his time on the qui vive for jackbooted fascism, in a state of profound depression over the advance of trie military-industrial complex, and down in the dumps over the incurable nincompoopery of a people addicted to "The Newlywed Game...
...You can't make up stuff this good...
...A tungsten tummy...
...responsible for any of this stuff...
...11 Things could get worse...
...From the time we whipped Grenada in a fair fight to the day the old boy dropped off the wreath at Bitburg, this Administration has been nothing but laughs...
...I bring you good news...
...Gosh, it's a good thing I have a will of iron or I'd be hard put to suppress those little twinges of sympathy...
...We always thought of Zunk as a Texas-liberal-in-training...
...Here are six perfectly good reasons to keep laughing during the Reagan Administration: Molly Ivins will be writing every other month in The Progressive...
...No matter how bad it gets, no matter how much they foul things up, it's not our fault...
...This is most inspiriting...
...Nothing is more consoling than the long perspective of history...
...Ever been to a YAF convention...
...You could cry or you could throw up...
...It will perk you up no end to go back and read the works of progressives past...
...H We're not...
...And now, lo, after all these years of nobody even knowing we were down here, it turns out Texas liberals are among the few folks who know how to survive Reagan...
...All you need in order to laugh about Reagan is a strong stomach...
...Brethren and sistren, this can not only be endured, it can be laughed at...
...I am putting this spell in the wilderness to good use myself: That awful tendency we liberals have to bleed from the heart over victims of cruelty and injustice is so off-putting...
...The fact that they probably will should not be used as an excuse for tossing away this golden opportunity to rejoice in the relative delight-fulness of our current situation...
...He just took it in as a little roughage every day...
...In fact, there's another perfectly good reason to be grateful to Ronald Reagan: He's so amazing that zillions of future writers are daily being discouraged from ever trying their hands at fiction...
...You want to wind up looking like Jeane Kirk-patrick...
...As a life-long Texas liberal, I have spent the whole of my existence in a political climate well to the right of that being created by Ronald Reagan and his merry zealots...
...By comparison, SDS was a Marx Brothers movie...
...We've got a guilt-free eight years here, team, and given the amount of guilt we have to carry around with us when we have any say in how things get done, this should be our shining hour...
...One of my New Year's resolutions is to not feel sorry for Texaco, Inc., victim of manifest injustice though it is...
...Reagan cures the deficit...
...Beer also helps...
...H The Reagan Administration is genuinely funny, honest it is...
...It may be true, as Tom Lehrer believes, that satire died the day they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize...
...See the Editor's Memo on Page 4. H Things are not getting worse: Things have always been this bad...
...To be a liberal in the Reagan Era—not to mention being a lefty, pinko, comsymp—strikes most of us as damned hard cheese...
Vol. 50 • March 1986 • No. 3
