Molly at the Mall

One sure thing to look forward to in this otherwise iffy month of March is a new book by Molly Ivins. This one is called You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years, and it’s a keeper. Never mind that you’ve already read some of the several dozen syndicated columns contained herein during the past few years. Ivins is one of the very few journalists of our time whose observations and analyses have a staying power well beyond the morning’s news.

Of particular interest to our provincial hearts is Ivins’s take on the Michael Dorris case—actually a stinging rebuke of the handling of the author’s suicide by the Star Tribune, where Ivins herself worked back in the 1960s—and a tribute, of sorts, to Mall of America, which she visited in 1994. In both instances, Ivins writes from up-close and personal: Dorris was a “semifriend” of hers, and she’s a self-confessed sucker for shopping malls, “where [she] can watch people being themselves.”

Born and bred in east Texas (her home base for the past several years has been Austin, her employer the Fort Worth Star-Telegram), Ivins is nonetheless almost giddily fond of her long-ago professional stomping ground—“my beloved Minnesota,” she calls it. She thinks Minnesotans are the nicest people in America (“I know they hate that stereotype . . . . But they are awfully nice”), and “in a nation frequently lacking in civility, there is much to be said for nice.”

Thus, though she visited Bloomington prepared to dislike the megamall for its oft-described excess, Ivins ends up giving it—and us—the benefit of the doubt:

“[W]hat are we, the spiritual descendants of Puritans, to make this monument to materialism? So much stuff it makes you sick to look at, like eating too much cotton candy. Stores that sell only stuff to put your stuff in. Subspecialties of stuff beyond the wildest dreams of most of the world’s people. Should we not disapprove? Well, yeah. On the other hand, the Pyramids were built for pharaohs on the happy theory that they could take their stuff with them. Versailles was built for kings on the theory that they should live surrounded by the finest stuff. The Mall of America is built on the premise that we should all be able to afford this stuff. It may be a shallow culture, but it’s by-God democratic. Sneer if you dare: this is something new in world history.”