Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
A paraphrase of Beowulf (starting around line 1383).
Beowulf said “We must mourn our friends later; they have died, but we have not yet avenged them. While we live, we win whatever victories we can; so now let us hunt the monster, whether its trail lead through the middle of the earth or the bottom of the sea.”
The monster is hiding, but heroes are hunting it.
On July 4, 1941–five months before Pearl Harbor–a long poem titled Listen to the People, written by Stephen Vincent Benet, was presented on nationwide radio. The full text was also printed in Life magazine. Here’s the whole thing. I posted an excerpt of this poem at Chicago Boyz in 2006…in the comments, Steve Barton points to a podcast of a 1943 performance of this work.
Other 4th of July reading:
Power Line has thoughts from Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge(!)
Reenlistment ceremony in Baghdad.
Update: Corrected date of original radio broadcast of the Benet poem.
Bag broke suddenly
My six nice avocados
Down the embankment
Project Valour-IT is an effort to provide voice-activated laptops to Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines who have suffered injuries making it difficult or impossible for them to use a standard keyboard. The annual fundraising drive in now underway–please consider contributing.
It’s often been said that the test of a society is how well it treats its children. Another important test, though, is how well it treats people who have fought and suffered on its behalf.
Rudyard Kipling wrote one of his lesser-known poems on this subject. You are no doubt familiar with Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade–well, here is The Last of the Light Brigade.