John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith og hans kone Catherine

En av mine største helter er den canadisk-amerikanske økonomen John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006).  Hans selvbiografi "A life in Our Times" er kanskje den boka jeg ville ha tatt med på ei øde øy.  I dette innlegget skal jeg bare gi et eksempel fra den boka på Galbraiths humor, en viktig grunn til at han er en sånn glede å lese.

En av personene som åpenbart appellerte til Galbraiths humoristiske sans, var Major General Orvil A. Anderson. I 1945 vurderte bl.a. Galbraith og Anderson effekten av de alliertes bombing av Tyskland og Japan. Anderson var flyvåpenets mann, og forsvarte dets ære også i dette spørsmålet.  Utdrag (s. 197-8, 236-8):

In World War II, Air Force officers affected a casual as distinct from a spit-and-polish style. Orvil went further and managed to look as though he had slept in his uniform.

(...)

He was highly intelligent, without tact, believed in air power as others believed in the Holy Spirit and was compulsively articulate. (...) In Washington one day early in the war when Anderson was a staff officer, his mastery of nonstop conversation exhausted the patience of Henry Harley Arnold, the head of the Air Force, and also the limits of the sunny disposition that caused Arnold to be called Hap. He told Anderson to proceed to Bolling Field and place himself aboard whatever airplane was that day going the greatest distance from Washington. Anderson asked if that was an order; Arnold replied that it was from the heart. So Anderson went to London and out to Eighth Air Force headquarters at High Wycombe, where, in accordance with custom, he again occupied himself in nonstop talking.

(...)

Orvil Anderson told me one day that he was planning a trip to the island battlegrounds of the South Pacific. (...) The trip would have the principal purpose of proving that the distance between Guadalcanal and the Philippines, which it had taken MacArthur three years and more to traverse with his antiquated conceptions of warfare, could be covered in a B-17 in one day. I was asked along to help confirm the fact. Other and deeply fraudulent reasons having to do with the need for a firsthand view of the scene of South Pacific air operations were adduced and solemnly accepted.  Unnecessary travel is always more ingeniously as well as more indignantly defended than that which is useful.

(…)

In Shanghai we picked up a businessman who needed a ride to Manila. Through the night, in competition with the motors, which were separated from us by only a thin skin of metal, Orvil Anderson recounted for him the history of the air war in Europe, lingering with pleasure on the thinking behind each of the many missions. The businessman was deeply pleased by the attention; Anderson was delighted to have a listener who did not, as we had learned to do, take evasive action. The consequence was that Orvil totally lost his voice. The rest of our voyage was in blessed peace.

(...)

An admiral who accompanied us told of the need to modernize the defenses of Manila Bay. He was not a radical in such matters. The famous concrete battleship which before the war had been part of the defenses would have to be replaced by a concrete aircraft carrier. To see the effect on Anderson, I endorsed the concept. His outrage was extreme, and he couldn't make it known."

Vi runder av med svenske Jan Åströms versjon av "Märk hur vår skugga" av Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), fra forestillingen "Life of Bellman" i Ulriksdals Slottspark nær Stockholm, en "underbar sommarkväll i juni 2010":