Monday, May 01, 2006
Monday Morning Soliloquies
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) * Late Spring
*
Nothing is so beautiful as spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush
Thrush's eggs look like little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing:
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy ?
A strain of earth's sweet being in the beginning...
--Gerard Manley Hopkins*****
He was a giant. I could imagine the reaction of the rapacious champions of laissez faire who now call the shots about economic policies of the current administration. Sacrilegious....socialist or worse! Bart Barnes in the Post:"One of the most influential was "The Affluent Society" (1958), which argued that overproduction of consumer goods was harming the public sector and depriving Americans of such benefits as clean air, clean streets, good schools and support for the arts." Galbraith was the right person for the time when he was appointed by President Kennedy as the U.S. Ambassador to India.
- Dr. Galbraith was generally considered to have been an apostle of the theories advanced by British economist John Maynard Keynes: that government could promote full employment and a stable economy by stimulating spending and investment with adjustments in interest and tax rates, and deficit financing.
- He lamented what he believed was an excess accumulation of private wealth at the expense of public needs, and he warned that an unfettered free market system and capitalism without regulation would fail to meet basic social demands. This was echoed in "The Affluent Society."
Sunny and warm days at last. For us in the San Francisco Bay area it felt as though the cold and rainy days would never end. They continued a month beyond the spring solstice. Now it feels like spring and it is a good feeling.
©Ian Britton, Freefoto.com
Spring
©Ian Britton, Freefoto.comNothing is so beautiful as spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush
Thrush's eggs look like little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing:
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy ?
A strain of earth's sweet being in the beginning...
--Gerard Manley Hopkins
