Charlie,

I've been away tending a sick relative where there is no computer and I must return
soon. But before I go I'll attempt a response.

The Pound quote is naive. Its naive because it presupposes somewhere within the
U.S. kleptocratic system even the remotest possibility for integrity and honest
appraisal. Ironically, it is the same sort of naivete that En Lin Wei brought to
this argument while CONDEMNING Kung.

In reference to U.S. foreign policy, it is wholly pro-active and aggressive. Even
when it is not openly aggressive its inevitable underlying ulterior motives run
counter to the purist ethic posited by Pound. I was going to give you one example
but 50 immediately sprang to mind. So I'll quickly give three.

The recent uproar about the CIA use of torture!!!?? as though SAVAK, Salvadoran and
Guatemalan death squads, assault on AIM, Phoenix, MKULTRA, the KCIA and the other
thousands of indigenous U.S. and trained for export torturers never existed. As
though the School of the Americas (name now changed to something less memorabe)
never existed solely to train people in the use of torture. And its naive to think
otherwise noy by fiat but by history. Pound's prescription? Doesn't even register
with these guys. He was held for the radio broadcasts, not the Cantos. They didn't
give a rat's ass about the Cantos. Too beautiful. Not pragmatic.

Ted Shackley died last week. In our studies, Joe Brennan and I have been bumping
into Shackley since Vietnam, the Phoenix program and protecting Vang Pao's raw
opium trade out of the Golden Triangle. Shackley once justified his actions as
fighting communism. Running coke with the Medillin did help fight communiism in
that it provided black funding for the self-defense forces and "secret" U.S.
commando units operating in Colombia in there actions against the FMLN and ELN.
Kung through Pound would have been at best laughable under these circumstances.
Now, think of another world class murderer recently dead---Richard Helms.

Then there is the advertisement here for the new privatized Virginia Electric Power
Company, NVEPC(sic?). They got themselves an add. The add shows a rather large
house, in Albertian persepective, two floors, perhaps 10 or 12 windows across on
each floor and all of the windows show lights burning behind them in a not so
subtle orgy of oil consumption. The narrative over this obscene scene talks of how
the company has every intention of protecting the right of the American consumer to
have 30 lights and appliances burning at once. The narrative can best be described
as militaristic and in another age might have made sense to a middle class German
or a Brit at the height of Empyre. Yet, we have to endure career liars like Don
Rumsfeld, in high positions, telling us and convincing most that an attack on Iraq
is not about oil. That the U.S. sponsored attempts at a coup in Venezuela are not
about oil, not that it even gets to this most obvious of conclusions in the stooge
press, we have here. Forgotten (or simply not known) are the histories of
Indonesia/ Eats Timor and Somalia vis a vis the black gold. Christ, the power
company in their add is attempting to link the two, war and oil,  in the viewers
mind using techniques from Edward Bernays classic 1928 work, Propaganda. And
succeeding in creating that Chimera of Divine Right in an asinine American public.
The Vietnamese poet Phan Van Tri wrote in his poem the Mosquito vis a vis the
French colonialists: "When a convenient swatter comes my way, I'll swat you without
a blink." 9-11. No?

And then there's the naive tone of isolation in Pound's Kung. But I've got to run.
I won't be near a computer for 2 days. Carlo Parcelli

Apologies for the single draft.


charles moyer wrote:

> Well, Tom, looks like I've come to reply to my own email and as for your
> anticipation of participation in investigation of the original question
> looks like the same thing happened again which always happens here. Every
> time the jar of Pound ointment is opened one of the lurking list flies which
> continually circle immediately dive into it and initiate the same reaction
> from those who happen to like this brand of poetic unction.
>     So let's forget Spengler for the moment, all sit quietly on our mortar
> boards currently being used or not, and watch me try again just for the
> benefit of all the flies who have missed their ointment opportunity up to
> now.
>     I went through "Impact", couldn't find a mention of Spengler, but found
> the following in hope that it might be relevant to understanding Pound's
> attitude toward America, America's own view of itself and how it relates to
> the rest of the world, and possibly that it might still have some
> significance even for today's ointment flies.
>  From "Impact"- p.221
>
>     "The drear horror of American life can be traced to two damnable roots,
> or perhaps it is only one root: 1. The loss of all distinction between
> public and private affairs. 2. The tendency to mess into other peoples'
> affairs before establishing order in one's own affairs, and in one's
> thought. To which one might perhaps add the lack in America of any habit of
> connecting or correlating any act or thought to any main principle
> whatsoever; the ineffable ruddderlessness of that people. The principle of
> good is enunciated by Confucius; it consists in establishing order within
> oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without
> specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other
> peoples'affairs. Against this principle of evil no adequate precaution is
> taken by Christianity, Moslemism, Judaism, nor, so far as I know, by any
> monotheistic religion."
>
> Can't say this is not consistent with material in "The Cantos", for those
> who like to stick to them in discussing Pound, and "The Cantos" are a sort
> of journal in sea surge for P's trip through his ocean of time which is a
> bit larger than most folks'. Still here in 2002 though. But is he relevant?
> Does his message, "his principle of good" = "order in oneself" have any
> value? Or should we be lead by another goose on the continued crusade
> against the very thing of which we ourselves are guilty - "messing into the
> affairs of others"? Those whose affairs you mess in never seem to believe
> the reasons given are the real ones. Never can see that it is "for their own
> good".
>     Was Pound's mistake also America's - That he tried to make a terrestrial
> paradise? Will people around the world some day say, "America went crazy"?
> Are some saying it now?
>
> Chas
>
>  "Raise no longer an arm against them! Innumerable are they, and it is not
> thy lot to be a fly-flap." -Nietzsche's "Zarathustra"
>
> ----------
> >From: charles moyer <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >Subject: Re: Roma locuta, causa finite.
> >Date: Fri, Dec 27, 2002, 12:39 PM
> >
>
> > ----------
> >>From: Tom White <[log in to unmask]>
> >>To: [log in to unmask]
> >>Subject: Re: Roma locuta, causa finite.
> >>Date: Fri, Dec 27, 2002, 9:28 AM
> >>
> >
> >> (I thought I sent this message way back in December but just discovered it
> >> unsent in my drafts. Hope it's still pertinent.)
> >>
> >> My guess, off the top as they say, (and I have just read the essays in
> >> Impact) is that Pound wouldn't (couldn't) fault much S. says as description,
> >> but the underlying tone of exultation in the advance of the inevitable, in
> >> triumphant "Destiny," etc., is the kind of thing he didn't like in S., whom
> >> he someplace said wasn't a patch on Frobenius, at least when it came to
> >> Germans. The most heartwarming thing about Pound (to me) is that he never
> >> accepted anything as "inevitable" while breath lasted, in other words while
> >> men of intelligence and good will could be energized to fight for the right.
> >> This very much an instant reaction. Will be interested to see what others
> >> say. Tom White
> >
> >     Agreed, Tom, I think you can make a good case that Pound held out hope
> > to the very end. Ironically that would make him very American in the best of
> > that naive Weltanschauung.
> >     No index in my "IMPACT: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American
> > Cilvilization". Here we go again to the bottom of the murky pond.
> >
> > Charles
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> From: charles moyer <[log in to unmask]>
> >>> Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> >>> <[log in to unmask]>
> >>> Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 08:34:05 -0500
> >>> To: [log in to unmask]
> >>> Subject: Roma locuta, causa finite.
> >>>
> >>> Just for the fun of discussion-
> >>> Would Pound agree or disagree?
> >>> What do you think?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> "This is the end of Democracy. If in the world of truths it is proof
> >>> that decides all, in that of facts it is success. Success means that one
> >>> being triumphs over the others. Life has won through, and the dreams of the
> >>> world-improvers have turned out to be but the tools of master-natures. In
> >>> the Late Democracy, race bursts forth and either makes ideals its slaves or
> >>> throws them scornfully into the pit. It was so, in Egyptian Thebes, in
> >>> Rome, in China - but in no other Civilization has the will-to-power
> >>> manifested itself in so inexorable a form as in this of ours. The
> >>> thought, and consequently the action, of the mass are kept under iron
> >>> pressure - for which reason, and for which reason only, men are permitted
> >>> to be readers and voters - that is, in a dual slavery - while the parties
> >>> become the obedient retinues of a few, and the shadow of coming Caesarism
> >>> already touches them. As the English kingship became in the nineteenth
> >>> century, so parliaments will become in the twentieth, a solemn and empty
> >>> pageantry. As then sceptre and crown, so now peoples' rights are paraded
> >>> for the multitude, and all the more punctiliously the less they really
> >>> signify - it was for this reason that the cautious Augustus never let pass
> >>> an opportunity of emphasizing old and venerated customs of Roman freedom.
> >>> But the power is migrating even today, and correspondingly elections are
> >>> degenerating for us into the farce that they were in Rome. Money organizes
> >>> the process in the interests of those who possess it, and election affairs
> >>> become a preconcerted game that is staged as popular self-determination. If
> >>> election was originally 'revolution in legitimate forms', it has exhausted
> >>> those forms, and what takes place is that mankind "elects" its Destiny
> >>> again by the primitive methods of bloody violence when the politics of
> >>> money become intolerable." -Spengler (1918) (2002)
> >>>
> >>> Chas