Summary Of What I Did To Morris Udall
“What I did to Morris Udall”: A Critique Molly Ivins wrote an apologetic piece in 1994 entitled “What I did to Morris Udall.” Ivins was a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram when this column was published in the editorial pages of The Times. However, Ivins did not start at the top; she had to work to earn her spot. Ivins had an opportunity to earn her spot when she was assigned a job to create a political profile on Morris Udall in the New York Times Magazine, as other writers were doing for the other candidates that would be the democratic representative for the presidential elections. This writing job is what she writes about; flashing back to the time when she did who she believed to be not only a decent guy, but a great politician
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She does not need to make more professional errors trying to fix the situation. She had done what she intended to do; she had gotten herself to be a named journalist. However, to me, audience is a big issue, she was writing for a 1976 election when she made her first wrong. It took her all the way up to 1994 to apologize for her wrongdoings. By that time, Udall’s political profession was over, and she could not do anything about it. If the audience for the piece she had wrote in 1994 does not include the people affected by the election of 1976, what was the point? She may have lost readers because of the irrelevance that it had to today’s world. This essay is aged, but I am not aged, therefore it did not make sense to me. Until I read this essay, I personally had no idea who Udall was; I could not even tell a person what number of president Jimmy Carter was for the United States. A red flag should have hit Ivins square in the forehead about the audience she was reaching out to when she wrote the words: “He’s retired now, victim of a sad, slow, wasting disease” (Ivins 145). At that point, she should have evaluated the conditions of the present: he was retired, and no longer a part of not even Arizona’s government systems. She should have challenged herself with the question: Why would the entirety of America care what I have to say to Udall as an apology? However, it does take guts to apologize not only privately, but publically as a writer for a mistake she had
She does not need to make more professional errors trying to fix the situation. She had done what she intended to do; she had gotten herself to be a named journalist. However, to me, audience is a big issue, she was writing for a 1976 election when she made her first wrong. It took her all the way up to 1994 to apologize for her wrongdoings. By that time, Udall’s political profession was over, and she could not do anything about it. If the audience for the piece she had wrote in 1994 does not include the people affected by the election of 1976, what was the point? She may have lost readers because of the irrelevance that it had to today’s world. This essay is aged, but I am not aged, therefore it did not make sense to me. Until I read this essay, I personally had no idea who Udall was; I could not even tell a person what number of president Jimmy Carter was for the United States. A red flag should have hit Ivins square in the forehead about the audience she was reaching out to when she wrote the words: “He’s retired now, victim of a sad, slow, wasting disease” (Ivins 145). At that point, she should have evaluated the conditions of the present: he was retired, and no longer a part of not even Arizona’s government systems. She should have challenged herself with the question: Why would the entirety of America care what I have to say to Udall as an apology? However, it does take guts to apologize not only privately, but publically as a writer for a mistake she had