Mike Royko On...Iraq?

By: Greg Mitchell Mike Royko, the famed Chicago columnist, was a kind of hero for me, starting in the late-1960s when I was in college. With no Internet then, and no access to Chicago papers, I did not catch many of his columns, just the ones that got national exposure or were sent to me by friends -- the best of the best.

Of course, I was far from alone in my fandom, and others will remember Royko (who died in 1997 at the age of 64) for brilliant and/or witty commentary on Mayor Daley, the Cubbies, Windy City barflies or Slats Grobnik. But as a non-Chicagoan, I still associate him with the days when I first ?met? him: the Nixon era. Perhaps that?s why a random posting on the popular political blog, DailyKos, caught my eye recently.

Someone with the Kos name Jazzmaniac had written that he/she had come across a clipping from the old Chicago Daily News ?squirreled away? by his/her father, dated January 24, 1973. It was a column written by Royko the day Nixon's announced a peace treaty ending the Vietnam war, after more than 50,000 American deaths. Jazzmaniac?s take: ?It reads as though it could be written today, or more accurately, at some point in the future, after our amnesic nation once again disengages from our latest quagmire.?

That?s true enough. Here are a few excerpts:

--Mike, the newsstand man, was alone at State and Madison, shivering in the cold night. "Nah, nobody's been around celebrating," he said. "What's to celebrate?"

It wasn't like 1945, when the end of the war brought a million people downtown to cheer....And that's as it should be. There is nothing to cheer about this time, except that it is over....

"Peace with honor." [Nixon] had used the wilted phrase that has been with us most of the war. He said we obtained it. It is hard to see the honor....Before it ended, we had put our own men on trial for murdering civilians....

-- Almost 20 years ago another war ended in a draw and we were told that our boys had died for somebody's freedom?.Why kid ourselves? They didn't die for anyone's freedom. They died because we made a mistake. And we can't justify it with slogans and phrases from other times.

--It tore us internally. It left many with a lust for revolution, and others with a lust for repression.

--If we insist on looking for something of value in this war, then maybe it is this: Maybe we finally have the painful knowledge that we can never again believe everything our leaders tell us. For years they told us one thing while they did another. They said we were winning while we were losing. They said we were getting out while we were going in. They said the end was near when it was far.

Maybe the next time somebody says that our young men must fight and die somewhere we will not take their word that it is for a worthy cause. Maybe we will ask them to spell it out for us, nice and slow, nice and clear.

And maybe the people in power will have learned that the people of this country are no longer willing to go marching off without having their questions answered first....If we haven't, then we are as empty and as cold as the intersection of Madison and State.