Life & Wisdom Quote by Mike Royko

A whole migration story gets compressed into a barroom punchline: America tilts, and its eccentrics tumble toward the Pacific like loose produce. Royko’s genius here is that the line flatters and needles at the same time. It treats “fruits and nuts” as a comic inventory of outsiders, dreamers, hustlers, seekers, and cranks, yet it also implies the country needs them somewhere - a designated zone where reinvention is permitted, where weirdness is less a scandal than an industry.

The “God” opener is doing quiet work. It’s mock-providential language, a wink at the way Americans mythologize westward movement as destiny rather than economics, policy, or simple restlessness. By blaming the tilt on divine intervention, Royko parodies national self-seriousness: we don’t just relocate; we fulfill prophecy. The image is physical, almost slapstick, but the subtext is sharper: the center pushes people out, and California (or “the West” as idea) becomes both refuge and dumping ground.

Royko wrote as a Chicago columnist, and you can hear the Midwest vantage point: affectionate contempt for coastal flamboyance paired with an awareness that the country’s pressures - conformity, moral policing, limited horizons - generate their own escape velocity. The joke lands because it’s not only about California being odd; it’s about America needing a frontier to absorb its excess personalities, its overflows of ambition and misfit energy, so the rest of the map can keep pretending it’s normal.