Saw some discussion recently about a old Mike Royko column, written at the end of the Vietnam War, and how perennially timely his commentary was. Pretty compelling stuff, but I didn’t care for the chunky way the text was presented, so I poked around a bit until I found a fulltext version. Here’s an excerpt:
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?”
The end of the war. Mr. Nixon said it on TV, half an hour ago.
He shrugged. “That so? Now maybe we can take care of things in this country, huh?”
A young couple came around the corner, heads down in the wind. They disappeared down the subway ramp and the corner was again empty.It wasn’t like 1945, when the end of the war brought a million people downtown to cheer.
Now the president comes on TV, reads his speech, and without a sound the country sets the clock and goes to bed.
And that’s as it should be. There is nothing to cheer about this time, except that it is over. Even the announcement could have been put more simply. Mr. Nixon’s efforts to inject glory into our involvement were hollow. All he had to say was that it is finally over.[...]
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, and 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.
I hope we have learned these things, because there is nothing else to show for our longest war. If we haven’t, then we are as empty and as cold as the intersection of Madison and State.
I think anyone who’s spent a winter night in the loop will agree with me that Royko just about nails it there. Fitzgerald said, “In the long dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning,” and so now here’s a location to go with that.
