Actually "fascism, American style" is just good old capitalist
democracy showing its teeth. Labelling it fascism (or becoming too much
obsessed with Pound's fascism) obscures just how vicious the u.s. ruling
class can be. Lyndon Johnson said if you want to understand the u.s.
policy abroad, examine u.s. policy at home. It works in reverse. If you
want to understand u.s. policy at home, see what it's doing in Iraq. I
don't imagine that for most people in Italy under Mussolini daily life
was any more dangerous, and was probably safer, than life for blacks in
the U.S. south at the same time. I read Wright's *Black Boy* when it was
first published, either during or right after the war, and I remember
how at the time his story of leaving the south reminded me so vividly of
all the wartime fiction I had read and movies I had seen that revolved
around escape from the Gestapo (the classic example being *Casablanca*
-- but Wright's autobiographical tale was just as gripping).

    And I doubt that Ethiopia suffered any more from Mussolini than
Vietnam did from the U.S. It really is politically misleading to focus
too much on Pound's personal bad politics, and it obscures the dynamic
of the *Cantos* to contrast his adherence to Mussolini too much with his
adherence to Jefferson, Jackson, and Benton.

    Query: Did Pound buy into the metaphor of Statesman as Artist? (The
difficulty with this metaphor is that the sculptor's raw material is
clay or stone, not people.)

Carrol Cox