Trust Walt Whitman to know what's important.

Courtesy of Robert Pinsky, a poet himself, and the Boston Globe, with a H/T to BarbinMD at Daily Kos:

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies - nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes - nor Mississippi's stream:

This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name - the still small voice vibrating -America's choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen - the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous'd - sea-board and inland - Texas to Maine - the Prairie States - Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West - the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling - (a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's): the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity - welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

- Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify - while the heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

Please note the second installment is up of MJS's photo essay on Sunday's protest march in Hollywood; don't miss it, or the first, and the comment thread it elicited. Molly would have approved; Molly would have been at one of them.

Technical difficulties of an, as yet, unknown origin kept me from posting, as promised here, our first installment of a new weekend series, featuring our attempt to bring to bear Molly Ivins' words on the week to week reality we now face, tragically, without her actual presence in her midst. So much seemed to be happening the last two days, I decided not to post it. Still a lot going on, (grinning, she rubs her hands), but I decided to throw it into the mix anyway.

What the hell is Joan Walsh, Salon's editor, thinking of?

After what this country has been through in the last six plus years -- a disastrous abnegation of constitutional government, stolen elections, the institutionalization of a permanent state of war, being lied into a disastrous actual war, the self-neutering of an increasingly enfeebled, corporate press corps; unapologetic cronyism, the sale of government functions to the highest bidder, constant lying at the highest level of our government…well, one could go on and on…in the face of all that, why is Salon once again welcoming back to its virtual pages the ridiculously passe Camille Paglia, among whose fetid, fevered observations you will find no references to any of the above depredations of our national culture brought to us by the modern Republican Party.

Are we still in that same cultural moment, even after the 2006 elections, which requires of a liberal online magazine that it feel compelled to prove it's independence from some imaginary left-wing, politically correct ethos by publishing the work of a hack writer and a worse thinker, who has made a career of bitter, partisan attacks aimed exclusively at her natural allies? Do we really need a post-modern lesbian Joe Lieberman? Isn't Lieberman's joementum more than enough of such foolishness?

Apparently no.

Most of you probably know that Molly Ivins has been battling breast cancer for years now. Some months ago, I noticed that Molly, in an appearance on C-SPAN, was wearing a cap, the kind of cap one might wear if one's hair had fallen out from something like radiation therapy.

Maybe it's just cold in the studio, I thought, and decided not to notice; after all, one couldn't tell from the volume or quality of her engagement and the work it produced that anything was wrong, so maybe it wasn't.

Inspired by Sarah's discussion (you can and should read here) of love and its discontents, and the heartbreaking nature of our times, after several days of procrastination, I decided we owe Molly our awareness, without her having to write something wonderful to get it.