Politics & Power Quote by Mike Royko

Royko’s line lands because it dresses tribal sports spite up in the costume of patriotism, then deliberately stains that costume. “As American as...” is the classic civic lullaby; he hijacks it to argue that identity in the U.S. is built as much from petty grievances and rule-bending as from flags and founding myths. The Yankees aren’t just a baseball team here. They’re a shorthand for entrenched power, big-city entitlement, bought success, and the smug assurance that history will keep siding with you. Hating them becomes a form of populist self-definition: the pleasure of declaring, from anywhere else, that you won’t be impressed.

The genius is the list. Pizza pie is an immigrant success story turned national comfort food. Then Royko swerves to “unwed mothers” and “cheating on your income tax,” refusing to let the reader stay in nostalgia. He’s not simply being “edgy”; he’s framing American-ness as a messy collage of aspiration, hypocrisy, and improvisation. The subtext: we celebrate our myths of wholesome virtue while quietly normalizing behavior that undercuts them. If you want a truly American tradition, he suggests, look for the gap between what we say we value and what we actually do.

Context matters: Royko wrote in the voice of a Chicago columnist who made a career of puncturing self-seriousness. Sports hatred, in his hands, becomes a safe proxy for deeper resentments about class, money, and the rigged feeling of institutions. The joke isn’t just that everyone hates the Yankees; it’s that this shared hatred might be the closest thing to national consensus we can manage.