Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 35 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.
Today’s book is Happy Days Were Here Again by William F. Buckley. This is a book of his columns and this one is the start of a July 20, 1992 column on John Kenneth Galbraith.
It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn’t used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking boats. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions – the reader gets subversive pleasure out of his Sisyphean labors, and some wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember as having been developed by Ben Hur, the model galley slave whose only request was that he be allowed every month to move to the other side of the boat, to ensure a parallel development in the musculature of his arms and legs. I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It’s great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over forty years, beguiling the subliterate world, here defined as those whose knowledge of what makes the world work is undeveloped.
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