Sunday in Chicago was a beautiful day and I headed over to the Printers Row Lit Fest, where I had spoken the day before. Once there, I heard a man talking in passing with the vendor of posters, in that easy, familiar intercourse of people connected by place – and for a moment I wished I lived in a city like Chicago - or Chicago, for that matter. But then I realized that that connection, that deep-seated social cohesiveness, while it still exists, is not as strong as it once was when there were metropolitan newspapers that everybody read and other institutions – like department stores – that everybody frequented. About all that’s left now to unite a city’s residents are its sports teams, which explains why sports are so popular today and why, at games, even grown men and women now wear the caps and jerseys of their home teams.
At one of the tents I found a book about Mike Royko. The great newspaper columnist was a man whom Chicagoans read and quoted and followed with a devotion that cut across ethnic and economic spheres and created a feeling of belonging among the population. That was Royko’s genius, and it doesn’t show up in every generation. But if it did today, it would be drowned out by a thousand podcasts.
