1. I object to ALL uses of the term "politically correct" because use
of this label is a form of ad hominem argument.  That is, rather than
addressing the arguments raised by a speaker, the term simply seeks to
discredit the speaker as a person. That is true whether the phrase is
used by people on the Right (as has almost universally been the case in
recent years) or when people on the Left seek (as Wei did in a posting
of a few weeks ago) to turn the phrase back against the Right.

2. Yes, Win has indeed raised one new issue in Pound studies: the
relationship between Fascism and Confucianism.  I recommend that he
write a book on the subject. Thus far I don't find his discussion of
the subject especially illuminating, because he doesn't seem willing or
able to think of Fascism as an historical phenomenon: not as some sort
of ahistorical essence, but as a political and cultural formation that
emerged at a specific moment in history, in response to the
circumstances of that moment. Thus I might be interested in the ways in
which Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalism--which was, I take it, genuinely a
form for Fascism--may have used the Confucian tradition to legitimate
itself, just as Mussolini's Fascism appealed for legitimation to the
Roman imperium. (Did this happen? I don't know Chinese and know little
Chinese history, so I can't say. But I'm curious.) However, Wei's
tendency to treat Confucianism as in effect the "same thing" as Fascism
seems to me as dogmatic and unilluminating as Pound's conflation of
Jefferson and Mussolini.

3. Don Wellman's comments today (which actually quotes some lines of
Pound's poetry!), coupled with Wei's comments of today, suggest to me
once again that there is a great gulf between those people who come to
Pound because they are interested in (charmed by, overwhelmed by) the
extraordinary inventiveness of his poetry (Zukosfky said that he had
the best ear of any poet of the century), and those who come to Pound
because they are interested in his "ideas."

Burt Hatlen