>Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 06:29:36 -1000 >From: Tim Bray <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: Re: Racial or cultural? >There is a secondary issue: how someone so deeply consumed by nasty, trivial, >idiotic views can at the same time be a deep well of pure poetic beauty. It's a fact of the world that decent honest people can often hold opinions about groups of people which are very different than the way they relate to individuals. Opinions which can be very vicious and have extremely harmful consequences. Many good decent Irish immigrants in the United States have made financial sacrifices to donate money which was used to finance terrorism in Northern Ireland. Good decent young Americans flew B-52 missions in which massive numbers of bombs were dropped on peasants in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia who were essentially random targets and who were not even visible to the bomber pilots. (The reason Lt. William Calley's action in Vietnam caused such an outrage was apparently the fact that he lined his victims up and had them shot at close range instead of bombing them from a distance.) Good decent people decided that the only answer was to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nakasaki because the Japanese, although willing to surrender, were not yet ready to accept the terms of unconditional surrender which we demanded. One thing that everyone who ever knew Pound in the later period of his life (starting with his time in Italy) seems agreed on was that Pound was a decent, kind, generous, and gracious man. There doesn't seem to be anyone who knew him casually when he was in his fifties, sixties, and seventies who didn't like him. (I can't speak for the feelings of his family and others who were really close to him.) There seemed to be something about him that people responded to positively. The guards at the Pisan prison camp were under orders not to talk to him or have any interaction with him, and he had been described to them as a despicable traitor, but some of them soon started showing kindness toward him in various ways. The townspeople where he had lived in Italy remembered him kindly and did not identify him with the Fascists, and when he returned to Italy, some of them still remembered him and were glad to see him back. And yet some of the things he writes in the Agresti letters and said in his radio broadcasts were inhuman in their viciousness. (As I've mentioned, I don't recall his conversations at St. Elizabeths ever containing this sort of viciousness. He just calmly and quietly and with complete confidence expressed his belief that Jews were treacherous people who could never be trusted and who deformed and distorted everything they touched. I think that my language here in summarizing his statements was much harsher than the language he actually used, but that was the overall message.)