Molly Ivins flexed a fencing foil in front of the Texas Capitol, circa 1991. (The joke, such as it was, was that Ivins was known for her

For a certain kind of Texas liberal, the last couple of weeks have been rough. Jim Harithas, the Houston museum director who was always happiest when he was fomenting some sort of revolution, died March 23. Then, a few days later, the Texas Observer went down. Now only a GoFundMe stands between the scrappy magazine and oblivion.

Neither piece of news should have come as a shock. Harithas was 90, and the Observer, bless its lefty soul, has been broke for most of the 68 years of its existence. A liberal magazine requires both liberals and literacy, and Texas never had too much use for either.

But here’s what rocked me: Harithas and the Observer both stood for a kind of Texas liberalism that I miss. While they were raising hell, they had fun. Why, dammit, did Texas liberals/lefties/cultural revolutionaries have to become such dutiful bores?

‘Radical chic’

Harithas was already old when I met him in 2000; I was writing about his comeback. It had been decades since the Contemporary Arts Museum’s board had fought with him over his “radical chic” aesthetic; decades since he’d given big breaks to Texas artists such as Luis Jiménez, Jesse Lott and Julian Schnabel; decades since he’d pointed a Salvatore Scarpitta tank sculpture across the street at the rich, staid Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — a declaration of war on staid, respectable art.

Harithas didn’t regret a single hijink. He showed me a black-and-white video of a CAM opening that sent his board into conniptions. The sexy, substance-enhanced party involved a giant bread sculpture, a food fight, and the high-kicking, short-skirted Kilgore Rangerettes. The cops had to shut it down. “That’s Texas,” Harithas said in his flinty Maine accent. “I went Texas.”

But Texas is no friendlier to hell-raising museum directors than it is to hell-raising liberal magazines. The board let Harithas go in 1978. “CAM supporters note cheerily that the museum’s image can only go up,” the Houston Post reported.

After that, Harithas lay low. First he fasted, for a life-threatening 42 days. Then he just stayed out of the public eye. Friends would later talk about his “lost years.”

Then, around 2000, he re-emerged. His wife, Ann, was an heir to the O'Connor oil-and-ranching fortune. Using that money, they launched funny little museums: first the Art Car Museum, housed on Heights Boulevard in what looked like a stoner’s shiny tin-can model of the Kremlin, complete with an onion dome; and then the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, on the edge of Third Ward, in a corrugated-metal building that looked like a place you’d get your engine overhauled.

Because the money came from Jim and Ann, there was no board to placate. The little museums’ opening-night parties were packed; Harithas made sure that the booze flowed freely. And the little museums gleefully showed political art that Harithas would never have gotten away with in the 1970s. Consider, say, the main image for a recent show of Clark V. Fox paintings: In it, Mr. Peanut asks, “Who would Jesus bomb?”

Harithas, raising hell, was having fun.

'More fun than the law allows'

If you know one thing about the Texas Observer, it’s that it’s where Molly Ivins got her start as a political smartass, the funniest observer of our state in her generation.

Ivins grew up in a conservative River Oaks family and had a fancy-pants education that included a stint in Paris and a master’s degree from Columbia. But legend has it that in 1970, she showed up in Austin for her Observer job interview carrying a six-pack: It was that kind of time, that kind of place.

The Observer, Ivins wrote, was “so poor that the business manager slept under the Addressograph and the reporters stole pencils from the governor’s office. For six years I lived below the poverty level and had more fun than the law allows.”

Mainly, Ivins had fun with the state’s politics. The Legislature struck her as “the finest free entertainment in Texas,” full of dinguses who were crooked, mean, racist, sexist, tasteless and/or just plain dumb.

“Some sensitive souls are sickened by it,” she wrote of her beloved Lege, “a few find it merely distasteful, and others persist in reporting on it in a way that squeezes all the juice and life out of it: ‘House Bill 327 was passed out of subcommittee by unanimous vote on Tuesday.'”

Ivins reveled in the juice and life. She had a front-row seat, for instance, when Houston’s Mickey Leland became “one of the first blacks ever elected out of a black district without ever having to get white folks’ permission to run at-large. He showed up wearing an Afro and dashikis, and the Bubbas thought he was some kind of freak-radical Black Panther, and it meant the end of the world was at hand.”

In the 1975 speaker’s race, Leland and the Black Caucus made a shrewd move, throwing their support to a Billy Wayne Clayton, whom Ivins identified as “a West Texas redneck.” In exchange, the caucus members got major committee chairmanships with honest-to-God clout. Leland, Ivins wrote, “came out of the meeting with Clayton waving a tiny Confederate flag and announced, ‘We done sold de plantation.’”

I can’t think of any writer who’d dare to write that scene now. And I also can’t imagine it appearing in the Observer, which these days is full of highly worthy investigative stories and respectful treatment of liberal-ish cultural enterprises — a documentary about queer repression, maybe, or an interview with a multi-cultural immigrant musician about the many facets of his identity. There's nothing anymore that'll make you snort-laugh.

I know it’s not fair to complain that the Observer isn’t as funny as it used to be; nobody is as funny as Molly Ivins. But I wish someone would at least try.

Depressed liberals

God knows that liberals could use cheering up these days. The right, it’s been said, has become more radical, and the left has become more depressed. Depression was shooting up among all Americans even before the pandemic — but it appears to affect Democrats significantly more than Republicans. In 2019, a Gallup poll found its biggest happiness gap to date: 94 percent of Republicans said they were “very” or “fairly” happy; only 83 percent of Democrats were.

There’s plenty of blame to go around: Smartphones, social media and COVID isolation have all messed with our heads. But why the liberal-conservative split? I’m struck by an argument that Jill Filopovic, Matty Iglesias, and Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff all make in varying forms: that the rising rate is related to depression-inducing ways of thinking, and liberals need to kick those habits.

Filipovic notes, for instance, that we rely too much on “the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are ‘deeply problematic’ or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental wellbeing suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, that they are not being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control of their own response.”

That rings true to me. Just to be clear: Depression is a godawful, serious disease with loads of contributing factors, some of them purely chemical. But mental habits are among those factors — that's why Cognitive Behavior Therapy often helps — and unlike our DNA, we have some control over our mental habits. We should fight depression with everything we've got.

And we should take note of good role models. Harithas and Ivins — and for that matter, the dashiki-clad Mickey Leland — all faced the forces of good-ol'-boy Texas at a time when a microaggression would have counted as progress. And like us, they all struggled with the usual share of human misery. But they looked for their openings; they took their shots. Fighting that way, even when they lost, energized them, and it energized the people around them.

Ivins died in 2007. She closed her last syndicated column with a call to action that, if you edit out the Bush-era politics, sounds like a recipe to fight depression:

“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action…. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous… We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"

That kind of engagement makes a democracy stronger. And if liberals do it right, it’ll be a hell of a lot of fun.

Lisa Gray is the op-ed editor and a member of the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board. Previously, she's held many of the Chronicle's most interesting jobs: Senior editor for digital, features enterprise editor, columnist — and, most fun of all, founding editor of Gray Matters.

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When Texas liberals were fun