Life & Wisdom Quote by Mike Royko

Royko’s line is a shrewd defense of “low” culture that doubles as a jab at the people who insist every popular artifact must justify itself with lessons. He isn’t confessing to being unthinking; he’s rejecting a certain kind of self-seriousness. John Wayne movies, in his telling, aren’t sermons. They’re machines built for a clean emotional payoff: order restored, villains punished, the world briefly made legible.

The subtext is political without being preachy. Wayne’s screen persona is an American myth of competence and righteous force, a fantasy that history rarely rewards so neatly. Royko knows that; he also knows why audiences buy the ticket anyway. In a messy civic moment (and Royko wrote through Vietnam, Watergate, and the grinding disillusionments of late-20th-century politics), there’s a guilty comfort in narratives where moral bookkeeping actually balances.

He’s also taking a swipe at intellectual gatekeeping. By admitting he went “for the simple pleasure,” Royko punctures the idea that taste must be defended with philosophy. Pleasure is allowed to be the point. Yet the sentence is too precise to be naive: “seeing the bad guys lose” is a calibrated craving, the desire for consequence in a world that often denies it. Royko frames escapism not as ignorance, but as a coping strategy - and quietly asks why reality so rarely provides the catharsis that a Western can deliver on schedule.