Bob,
Pound's patriotism is complex, but let me try to address, in a slapdash sort of way, some of your criticisms of Pound. His patriotism bears little resemblance to the sense of homeland one finds in the Old English elegies, which is kin-centric to an extreme, largely because of the central role kinship bonds played in Anglo-Saxon society and law. But to say that kin and homeland had no meaning for Pound is an exaggeration bordering on inaccuracy; though there is, I think, a kernel of truth in what you say, for Pound does often seems to take a rather detached view of "family" in general and did want away from them and away from home, and if he was concerned about The Common Man, he certainly made no hero of Him:
 
From SALVATIONISTS:
          
 Ah yes, my songs, let us resurrect
The very excellent term _Rusticus_.
Let us apply it in all its opprobrium
To those to whom it applies.
 
 
 
    THE PLUNGE
    I would bathe myself in strangeness:
    These comforts heaped upon me, smother me!
    I burn, I scald for the new,
    New friends, new faces
    Places!
    Oh to be out of this,
    This that is all I wanted
        -- save the new.
 
    And you,
    Love, you the much, the more desired!
    Do I not loathe all walls, streets, stones,
    All mire, mist, all fog,
    All ways of traffic?
    You, I would have flow over me like water,
    Oh, but far out of this!
    Grass, and low fields, and hills,
    And sun,
    Oh, sun enough!
    Out, and alone, among some
    Alien people!
 
 
Unsevered family and domestic ties are also the subject of derision in his early poetry:
 
Sketch 48b. 11
At the age of 27
Its home mail is still opened by its maternal parent
And its office mail may be opened by its parent of the opposite gender.
It is an officer,
        and a gentleman,
                and an architect.
 
 
 
But when Pound's not posturing, or being the satirist, his feelings about leaving his homeland are actually full of  deep, if displaced, sentiment. Compare The Exile's Letter, and the Four Poems of Departure from _Cathay_:
 
    Now the high clouds cover the sun
    And I can not see Choan afar
    And I am sad.
 
Many years later,  during WWII, in one of the broadcasts, Pound starts to reminisce about his father and his job at the mint, and his mother and her Quaker family, who considered themselves superior to his father's family, and about his uncle, and the black woman who was their cook, better than any French chef, and the black man who helped out around the house, but was often to be found playing checkers on the cracker barrel ...  I don't have the text here at hand to quote from, but its a rather poignant passage in which Pound seems to be almost talking to himself, his radio audience overhearing him, and he's wondering what it is in "my psychology," he says, that caused these memories of his family to come to him.
 
Those points define a periphery. 
 
Pound the public man, the poet-pampheleteer whose subject is the destructive power international money exerts over nations, may seem to have lost sight of his "geneological base", as you put it, and may seem, for all the rapid shifting of time and place that occurs in the Cantos, to be "rootless".  But Pound's constant return to the simple tangible things to be found in the marketplace  -- food, leather goods, cattle, sheep, tongs, wagon wheels-- and his frequent excerpting of the simple, understandable, homely, non-specialist language of ancient statutes governing domestic commerce and trade, are sure indications that the concerns of "the average citizen" are never far from his mind. Pound began his career aiming for the elitist immortality of the bard. But as his vision matured, he came to want to leave behind a work that might do something to preserve the American consitution and to make American democracy immortal... a "paradiso terrestre".  
 
Tim Romano
----- Original Message ----- 
  From: bob scheetz 
  To: [log in to unmask] 
  Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 10:05 PM
  Subject: Re: tim romano & exile
 
 
  tim romano writes:
  >...forced exile is a grievous separation from friend and kin, and loss of identity.
   
  tim,
      yeh,...egregiously absent in ep,  homesickness
  ...signifying? home & kin bore no meaning for him ?
  ...signifying no geneological base,
  prinicple of structure or coherence.
  wouldn't that make for a rootless, shallow poetry;
  as it would, a person?  
  ...a kinda "california poetry", 
  ie, quintessentially "american" (in the sardonic sense),
  all novelty and technique?
  and indeed, doesn't his "adams cantos" america seem 
  got from books? stilted?...even more than his cathay?
 
  but, supreme irony, (as adorno pt'd out) odysseus
  is the archetypal bourgeois.  hero-ideal of a 
  gk merchant society aborning.  
  in contrast to achilles' noble absolutes, magnanimity,
  odysseus is all cunning and trickery
  ...instrumental reason
  ...very much  "the donald" or  "bill gates" or "the jew".
 
  so...while joyce uses the archetype to great effect, 
  it seems to me ep's odysseus is ultimately incoherent.
 
  whadaya think?
 
  bob
 
 
 
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
    To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
    Date: Thursday, February 24, 2000 9:47 PM
    Subject: Re: tim romano & exile
 
 
    Bob,
    You're right to say that Pound's "more the adventurer", at least as a young man. He paganizes, if you will, the exile theme in his translation of The Seafarer, turning it into a rejection of the comforts and security of the "burghers" while extolling with much bravado the open sea-road. But in OE elegies, that's not at all how the exile theme is portrayed: forced exile is a grievous separation from friend and kin, and loss of identity. There, the theme of exile usually ends in a renunciation of "this life". As an old man, Pound's comes close to this kind of renunciation.  
 
    Tim