MIKE ROYKO
A Liberal’s Conservative and Vice Versa

MIKE ROYKO (1932-1997), a Pulitzer Prize-winning, nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune, was born in Chicago in 1932. He attended Wright Junior College, the University of Illinois, and Northwestern University. After serving in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War, he joined the Chicago Daily News in 1952 as a reporter and was assigned a weekly government and political column in 1962. His long-running daily commentary, “Mike Royko,” first appeared in the Daily News in 1963. He described his role as follows: “My function is to explain things rather than report them.”

JW: You’ve written about the deterioration of manners in movie theaters.

MR: It’s the result of television: People are used to talking and they forget that they’re not alone when they’re in a theater. When I was a kid, I was an usher in a number of theaters and you just told ’em to shut up, and if they didn’t shut up, you took ’em out. Today it’s anarchy, although I occasionally I go to the movies in a small town in Wisconsin and the kids there are quiet, because for all they know, their uncle may be sitting two rows away. Uncles up there still have crew cuts, half of them are farmers, and they’re liable to give the kid a whack in the side of the head. So it’s different in smaller communities than it is in a big-city movie theater where if you tell somebody to shut up, he’s liable to pull out a knife. But it isn’t just television, it’s also the reason why people are carrying guns in their cars and shooting at somebody who cuts them off, why somebody beat up Dan Rather: People are a lot less inhibited when it comes to being uncivilized. It’s the age of the jerk.

JW: In a piece about the “age of the jerk” you wrote that the average politician is a far better man than his average constituent.

MR: That’s true. At the very worst, the politician reflects his constituents. In Chicago we have all these thieves who are aldermen, but they’re no worse than the people who elect them. People do get the kind of government they deserve.

JW: Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed that America has no binding ethic. Do you agree?

MR: The Super Bowl unites us. It’s our substitute for war. It’s our one unifying element, more so than even the World Series.

JW: I thought baseball was the national pastime.

MR: Baseball isn’t violent enough, and the games are too long.

JW: Do you consider yourself a curmudgeon?

MR: I may have certain tendencies. When I started writing my column, I just wanted to give people a laugh. It’s pretty hard to do that with nothing but silly subject matter. If you take on more serious subject matter and try to give them a laugh through that, then I guess it’s pretty hard to avoid being curmudgeonly.

There’s a problem in writing satire: If you publish it in a sophisticated magazine, you can expect readers to know what you’re talking about, but if you write for a newspaper or a bunch of newspapers, readers are easily confused.

JW: What do you figure is behind this lack of sensitivity to satire?

MR: There’s no laugh track. If we could build in a laugh track, people would know what’s funny.

JW: Are you concerned about the decline in the quality of education in this country?

MR: No. We went through a period in this country where everybody thought their kid had to have a college education. The result was we got stuck with a whole generation of overeducated dummies. Guys who should be slicing corned beef are mucking around some corporation making dumb decisions. You’ve gotta have a certain number of people to pump gas and work in the checkout line. If they don’t want to learn to read, if they don’t want to go beyond the second year of high school, okay, there’ll be a job out there for ’em.

JW: Isn’t that an un-American attitude?

MR: Yeah, but the reality is we can’t all be white-collar workers, we can’t all be executives, and I don’t blame the system. I can go through this newsroom and find kids who came out of affluent backgrounds and had the way paid for ’em, but I can also find reporters who came from families of very modest means and had to hustle to make it. The hustlers will make it, even today.

JW: Do conservatives think you’re liberal, and do liberals think you’re conservative?

MR: More conservatives think I’m liberal than the opposite, but it’s close. It’s funny what makes somebody a liberal in the conservative mind. I’ve been against lynching ever since I was a kid, so I guess that makes me a liberal. Civil rights was really the basis for that whole liberal image I had. I started my column in ’63, and the one recurring theme in my column was the civil rights movement. That didn’t mean that I agreed with every liberal position—I voted for Eisenhower against Adlai Stevenson and I couldn’t stand the Kennedys. People who read the column during the sixties thought I was a Commie. My God, I liked Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s the basis for the liberal label.

On the other hand, I did a column in which I figured out what percentage of federal civil service employees are fired in a given year and it’s incredible. I can’t think of any other work force in America where everybody does their job so well that nobody gets fired. Lawyers get disbarred, doctors get sued for malpractice, but federal bureaucrats are all so good that only one tenth of one tenth of one percent ever lose their jobs. Is that a liberal position? Of course not. The real classic liberals want bigger and better federal government. I believe in political patronage because you can fire a patronage worker.

JW: You’ve advocated public hangings for incompetent bureaucrats.

MR: I’ve advocated public hangings for a lot of things. Littering, for example. You hear people say, “There’s so much mess in the parks.” Well, the people who work in the park system don’t go around with bushels of litter throwing it around. They don’t say, “Okay, guys, here’s a hundred pounds of chicken bones, let’s throw ’em all over the parks.” People are slobs; they won’t walk twenty feet to dump their trash in a can. So I advocated the hanging of litterers in the parks. Just leave the bodies up there for a week. Boy, did I hear from people, some who agreed, some who thought I was cruel.

JW: Which disturbed you more?

MR (laughs): The ones who thought I was cruel. I preferred the ones who agreed, even though they thought I was serious. I’ve advocated public hangings for boom boxes, people who always veer out to the left before they make a right turn, anybody whose name appears in a gossip column in a favorable way more than three times a year. For a while I was in favor of executing politicians who lose elections. People would think twice about running for office. A lot of people agreed with me on that.

JW: You’ve taken on the National Rifle Association.

MR: I’ve always defended machine guns on the grounds that I should be able to buy one. I have poor eyesight, and beyond five feet, I couldn’t hit anybody with a pistol. But with a machine gun, you just blast away in the direction of the target and you’re bound to hit it. Why should I be deprived of the right to defend my home against Commies and fiends?

JW: Do you jog?

MR: I hate running. I’ll run in a game—I’ll run about a tennis court or a handball court, but it makes me nervous when I see someone jogging. Dogs’ll try to bite you. I did a column about a guy in Chicago who used to carry a bat when he jogged through the parks. Dogs would try to bite him. He used to carry spray stuff and that wasn’t effective, so he finally started carrying a bat. One day he hit this dog who was chasing him and broke the dog’s leg. The woman who owned the dog had him arrested, he had her arrested, and Louisville Slugger put out the “Fido Model” bat.