Mike Royko^• is the proverbial study in contrasts. Pretty much his entire career was built on showing how government doesn’t work. Government is always captured by the powerful, not against the weak, because the weak don’t have anything worth taking, but against the middle.

“We’re supposed to take it on faith,” he said, about the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, “that this agency does its job.” He said the same thing in different words pretty much about every government agency that crossed his pen.

It isn’t surprising that Royko didn’t look to Republicans for solutions: at the time, Republicans meant people like Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller, who were more progressive—more for big government—than Democrats. But he should have known better once Reagan was elected instead of somehow claiming that Reagan was wrong, and that the system that produced Leroy Bailey’s Veterans Administration and John Karpowicz’s Chicago should be given more unconditional power.

Yes, the Veterans Administration hospital system, that the left was praising just a few years ago in order to push the ACA on us. Mike Royko knew it was a mess of government sloth over forty years ago. And the very next article in this collection makes fun of Chicago politicians who say that the city government works, when instead it ignores hard problems (crime) and hounds the middle class when they are victimized by either crime from below or crime from above.

Mind you, Leroy Bailey was when Nixon was president. When it came to Democratic politicians, Royko tended to be more forgiving of government corruption. In Whitewater Almost Too Far Out There, he argued that the Clinton scandals were just what everybody did, and that the “McGoofy Group” talking about it should just talk about baseball instead. And then, after Representative Dan Rostenkowski was convicted of felony graft and illegal use of taxpayer money, Royko wrote, in Rostenkowski’s Sin Was Not Changing with the Times that graft was really a good thing. It was how politicians got things done for the little person. Royko writes that “The rules keep changing. Things we could once say or think are now taboo.” Which, while true, misses the point: paying people for jobs they never do and taking bribes may be common in Chicago, but for the rest of the United States we realized it was wrong back when Tammany Hall was busted.

Royko himself realized it when writing about Republicans. Nixon, for example, deserved whatever he got for his own corruption, and “the Republicans” deserved scorn for attending the same lavish balls that Democrats had during the Carter, LBJ, and Kennedy years.

Well, Royko was unquestionably liberal. Royko did start to realize that just pouring government money on a problem was not a solution, though it was just as Bill Clinton was about to take office. On December 1, 1992, he wrote that Chicago was already spending a whole lot of money for very little results, and that really solving the problem was going to mean getting parents involved in their children’s education.

Despite knowing that money doesn’t solve problems, he did complain that the money for Kuwait would have better solved problems on Chicago’s South Side. In hindsight, his very next article in this collection, about a member of a different South Side, tells us why it wouldn’t work. It’s about Los Angeleno Rodney King, and how King had “been leading the good life ever since” he got millions of dollars in damages from the Los Angeles Police Department.

But by the time King died, he was broke again:

He received a $3.8-million civil settlement from the City of Los Angeles, but pretty much all of it has disappeared by the time his fiancée discovered him on Sunday. As the LATimes reported in April, King was: “…jobless and virtually broke. Gone is the settlement money he got after suing the city for violating his civil rights. All $3.8 million of it. Huge chunks went to the lawyers, he says, some to family members, some he simply wasted.”

Rodney King wasted that money and that second chance just as Chicago’s South Side does. It seems a year doesn’t go by that Chicago, Illinois, or the federal government doesn’t allocate millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions to revitalize some part of the South Side, from Cabrini Green to a new library to a new CTA terminal.

As with education, not enough money doesn’t seem to be the issue. You can’t buy “the good life” with only money. Royko realized that sometimes, but not others.

So with all that, why do I enjoy reading him? His solutions, in retrospect, were counterproductive at least as often as they made sense, and he knew enough about government that he should have known better. He literally made his living complaining about the incompetence and corruption of government wherever it currently had responsibility, and asking for government solutions to just about everything else. So what makes Royko worth reading? He answers the question himself, inadvertently, in his June 13, 1979 column, John Wayne’s True Grit:

During the late 1960s, I had a serious falling out with a liberal friend… I was a John Wayne fan and he couldn’t understand that. John Wayne, he argued, stood for everything that was wrong…

“You’re right,” I told him. “But I still like John Wayne. His movies make me feel good…”

That’s why the Duke’s fans went to his movies. We knew he would not become bogged down in red tape, or fret about losing his pension rights, or cringe when his boss looked at him, or break into a cold sweat and hide in his room, or moan about his impotence, or figure the odds and take the safe way out.

He would do exactly what he did in True Grit, my choice as his greatest movie, when he rode out to bring in Dirty Ned Pepper, whom he had once shot in the lip.

As all John Wayne freaks recall, he was alone, as a hero should be, and he was sitting on his horse confronting Ned Pepper across a long, lovely valley. Ned Pepper was accompanied by several villainous friends.

Wayne informed Dirty Ned he was bringing him in—dead if need be.

And Dirty Ned sneered and said something like: “That’s mighty bold talk for a one-eyed old fat man.”

…

Ah, it was a wonderful moment. And it got better when Wayne, in a voice choking with anger, snarled: “Fill yer hand, you sonofabitch!”

And it got even better when he stuck the reins between his teeth, drew a pistol with one hand, a repeating rifle with the other, and galloped full speed into the valley, steering his horse with his teeth and blazing away with both weapons.

At the time, a movie critic—a man in his thirties—wrote that he was so overwhelmed by that scene that he abandoned his critical poise and stood on his seat in the theater, waving his arms and screaming: “Go, John, go!”

I didn’t get quite that carried away, being of a more mature age. I simply stomped my feet and put my fingers between my teeth and whistled as loud as I could.

Foolishness? Maybe. But I hope we never become so cool, so laid back, so programmed, that nobody has that kind of foolish, odds-defying, damn-the-risk spirit.

Because my problem with Mike Royko can also be read the other way: Royko recognizes when government goes wrong and he tells us about it, even though it cuts against what he believes about government. And even if he didn’t connect the dots to realize that the government solutions he supported were the reason he had ideas for his column every day, he still took the reins in his teeth and filled his hand with lead when someone needed to ride across that valley alone to confront another evil of big government that would otherwise have gone unmentioned and uncorrected.