The Lick Your Own Damn Boots Award
The LYODBA Tiara passes from Jon Carroll to Molly Ivins, who was elected by an overwhelming margin, handily defeating Paul Krugman and Mark Morford. NMB is proud to present this award to the woman by whom one might well say it was inspired. When you're looking for someone to just cut through the bullshit and tell it like it is, you cannot do better than the woman that many of NMB's readers habitually refer to as "St. Molly." Throughout her long and distinguished career, Ivins has always been not only willing but eager to be the first and the loudest to say, "Hey, not only is the emperor buck-naked, he's plug-ugly." And here in Orwell's America, there's nothing we need more desperately.
Perhaps the best recent example of what makes St. Molly a national treasure is her September 24, 2002 column, War Is Peace?. Ivins opens her response to the Bush administration's announcement of its strike-first, strike-at-will, strike-whoever-we-feel-like-smiting-today 'National Security Strategy' with a shocked and revolted refusal: "No. This is not acceptable." Those words should have been on the lips of every politician, pundit, and citizen in this country; but they weren't, and we should all thank Ivins for saying them. The column builds to this economic yet eloquent explanation of why this is not acceptable:
You can't put the case against Dubya's government any more succinctly than that. In other columns, Ivins has gone after the Homeland Security Bill, Total Information Awareness, and just about everything else you never see the corporate press bringing up. On behalf of all the Americans who are just as appalled and horrified as she is, but far less articulate, No More Blood is proud to confer the second annual Lick Your Own Damn Boots Award on a woman who has never known the taste of shoe leather. Battle on, Molly!
The LYODBA is presented to the journalist working in a mainstream media market who most deserves to be recognized for honesty and bravery in standing up to the government, public opinion, and their corporate overlords in order to tell the truth and/or question authority. The 2001 Lick Your Own Damn Boots Award was presented to Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's why.
When Carroll ran his September 12 column, "Welcome to the 21st Century," he emerged as one of the first and, at that point, only voices suggesting that we might respond to this disaster with patience, compassion, and a willingness to face up to our own responsibilities as a global power instead of hatred, agression, and instant retaliation. Since then, he has consistently attempted to ask questions nobody wants to hear and point out some of the blindnesses and hypocrisies that characterize not only our government's current foreign policy but the representation of both the disaster and its aftermath in the American media. That September 12 column points out something that I, along with Robert Jensen and other commentators far more distinguished than myself, have been fervently hoping that Americans might learn from this: that in the rest of the world, "many people live this way already," and we can no longer consider ourselves protected from the worst repercussions of the Cold War, uneven development, and globalization. While we consume ourselves in the obsessive effort to make ourselves secure, we desperately need people willing to point out the necessity, especially if we want to continue to be a free society, of acknowledging and accepting our inevitable vulnerability. Most recently, in his November 29 column, Carroll has taken on the thankless task of explaining why it matters that the Bush administration's newfound dedication to protecting the rights of women in Afghanistan is cynically derived from their own political and military agendas rather than any sincere knowledge of or compassion for the plight of women all over the globe, and thus saved me the trouble of trying to do a critique of the week about it.
The Lick Your Own Damn Boots Award does not include any kind of cash award or promotional services; its only purpose is to celebrate journalists who are using their powers for good instead of evil, and perhaps to introduce their work to people who will be as glad to stumble across it as I was. I did email Carroll to tell him what he'd won, whereupon he proclaimed himself "honored beyond measure" and promised to "appear at supermarket openings and let the common people touch my tiara."
Congratulations to our 2001 LYODBA Winner!