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