The Ragan Report last week joined the Chicago Tribune in noting the tenth anniversary of the death of legendary columnist Mike Royko.

To say that Royko was an opinion journalist with an edge would be an understatement. “Run your hand across a Royko column,” said the Trib, “and you could get cut.”

As proof, the Trib cited a Royko column on California in which he explained the state’s peculiarities by suggesting that God had tipped the nation on its side, “and all the fruits and nuts rolled west.”

When I read that, I had a shock of recognition. After nearly 30 years, I remembered the column. As I recall, it was a roast of Jerry Brown, then California’s governor, titled, in typical Royko-esque fashion, “Running Amok With Governor Moonbeam”

That was the title! You can imagine what the text was like.

As I recall, Royko began by alluding to a novel that had been published a few years before about California seceding from the U.S. and setting up an ecologically perfect society.

I think I can quote what followed from memory: “It was the stupidest book I ever read, but the idea of California becoming an independent country appealed to me. That way we could post guards on the borders. No one from California would be allowed to enter the U.S. without first passing a sanity test.”

Warming to his subject, Royko declared it was common knowledge that since the earliest days of the Republic, the nation’s oddballs had “migrated west in search of the land of their dippy dreams. And the oddest of the odd settled in California.”

The Trib said that Royko would be too politically incorrect to meet today’s standards of professional journalism. The Trib is probably right. And that is our loss.