Thank god it’s 9.12. This morning we commemorate that morning six years ago when we all woke up, if we had slept, or slept fitfully, and for a waking breath everything was the same. Coffee, paper, jump in the shower. Then, say it isn’t so, it hit. Despite groggy hope, we remembered what had happened the day before, 9.11.2001, our national Alive Day.
Nine-eleven, is now a very real quatro-syllabic number, a fulcrum of before and after, that second when the tide does shift. The day was excruciating this year, the new longest day of the year. The day was tropically muggy and on TV all day the military junta was laying out the fantasy league so-called surge. A dirge.
In other years, before the anniversary of 9.11, I had prepared, steeled myself to the sadness, made plans to be with a neighbor whose firefighter husband had been killed. This time, like soldiers in Iraq, I was unarmored; I had let my guard down. By 2p, I was restless and sad, claustrophobic in our apartment across the hall from new neighbors. I could not read one more tediously brilliant article about how bad it is. The war, the sub-prime mortgage rolling disaster, the trifecta of hypocrisy – Foley, Vitter, Craig. Such as.
That was when I remembered a small notice in the Sunday paper of a memorial service for Molly Ivins, at the Ethical Culture Society Hall scheduled for 4p on, of course, 9.11.
Never have I been happier to go to a memorial service. The soggy, sad crowd slogged in while a montage of photos of Molly – a long leggy sailor; smiling aunt hoisting a gleeful niece; wide-mouth, head back laugher; placard-carrying, hell-raising protestor; wheelchair bound, bald and mugging in a FOX news cap, receiving an award – looped on a screen onstage.
Calvin Trillin, Maya Angelou, John Leonard, Gail Collins, Kathleen Chalfant, and Lou Dubose, spoke of Molly as friend, writer, editor, story-teller, river rafter, partier, bawdy Texas babe and activist. They all quoted her hilarious lines. It was she who, Cassandra-like in The Texas Observer had warned of being bushwhacked by the Shrub from Texas. She wanted to live to see George Bush out of office, but she died from the breast cancer she had lived with for years.
There are memorials and there are memorials. As I shuffled out into quagmire of New York, I felt re-energized by the buoyant life of Molly Ivins, my co-columnist at The Progressive magazine for twelve years. She practiced the power of political satire and activism. Thank goodness for Molly Ivins.

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As Senator Larry Craig revealed on the police tape, (and why was that police tape revealed?) he is not gay and he doesn’t do that sort of thing. No, no, no. Obviously, he suffers from restless leg syndrome. And the side effects of the new drug he is on are an increase in gambling and sex addiction. I bet he will use the RLS Defense for that toe-tapping.

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Have you tried the three dimensional thesaurus? You probably have been using it for years, but I just recently discovered it. To find a synonym, you type in the word you need some others for, press “enter” and faster than even Google can congratulate itself, a very space age, beautiful floating word map appears like an answer in an upended eight ball.
The 3-D thesaurus looks like a word tinker toy with the key word on the center sprocket with spokes to other words. But I think there might be lead paint on it. I already had to ditch my Lead Barbie by Mattel. That kind of word-centric architectural construct is what it would take to diagram the recent events of the summer. I’ve tried a linear description to make sense of it, but it looks like one of my grade school sentence diagrams with adverbs dangling off adverbs like some mutant creeping vine.
The word at the center of the construct you’d need to Venn this late August is “dog”. As in dog days of summer. Off that would be the Michael Vick dogfighting/gambling spoke. Barry Bonds must be relieved to have the spotlight off him. Vick admitted running dogfights and inhumane treatment of dogs in his care. In a dyslexic moment of atonement, he said he’d found god. He could go to jail and his days of dogleg right quarterbacking for the Atlanta Falcons seem to be numbered. He would have received no time if he had just modeled himself after another football player and killed his ex-wife. He might even have gotten a book deal.
The understandable revulsion over the canine mistreatment suggests that news coverage of the war, floods, scandals should focus on dogs to get people riled up. Dogs are dying in Darfur! Dogs don’t have basic healthcare! Dogs were disenfranchised in Florida! The dogs of war are fighting a losing cause in Iraq! It seems to get people’s attention. Mitt Romney’s family vacation saga and mistreatment of the family’s beloved Irish setter would be a way into the story of his former Idaho campaign manager, the foot-tapping, non-gay Republican senator, Larry Craig.
Just as the Dick Cheney Buckshot Lunch incident had lost its absolute last shred of funny, along came Craig’s list of hilarious hypocrisy. During June, AKA Gay Pride Month, Senator Craig was picked up for lewd behavior in a bathroom at the airport in Minneapolis, the site of next year’s Republican Convention, if they have one. In our house, we think Dick Cheney is just going to declare himself the candidate. Larry Craig’s version of Dick’s Cheney’s famous line, “I just had a beer at lunch,” is “I’ve got a wide stance in a bathroom and my foot might have grazed the officer in the stall next to mine.” Ooftah! P.S. Larry’s drag name is “Miss Construe”.
Another spoke off “dog” would be the Alberto Gonzalez resignation. Although he submitted his resignation on a Friday, the story was released during Vick’s Monday press conference. Gonzalez, described as “the dogged defender of Bush”, wrote the rules of torture, some involving dogs on leashes, and was Bush’s lapdog at the Justice Department. Gonzalez’s hangdog announcement was in contrast to Karl Rove’s. With his master smiling his unconditional love behind him Rove, top dog, announced he was leaving to spend more time with his family. Which was last seen running from the house. Chinese Dog Food inspectors at least have the decency to kill themselves when things go wrong. Rove took a victory lap on the Sunday morning Kennel Club shows. He said he was like Moby Dick. The Moby is silent.
Your president George Bush once said that his is a lonely job, that at the end of the day, all that’s left is him and his little black dog Barney. Where is Laura? Has she left the family to spend more time in politics?

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