Ezra Pound and the Political Class

Ezra Pound and the Political Class

Within the vast tapestry of The Cantos, following the schemata of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Canto XIV and Canto XV are both referred to as the “Hell Cantos”, and according to Pound were a portrait of England during the years 1919 – 1920. To his close friend and intellectual sparring partner, Wyndham Lewis, he wrote: “You will readily see that the ‘hell’ is a portrait of contemporary England, or at least Eng. as she wuz when I left her.” In a letter to John Drummond: “the hell cantos are specifically LONDON, the state of English mind in 1919 and 1920.” Lastly, in a letter written to his father in 1925, Pound wrote: “I intended Cantos XIV and XV to give an accurate picture of the spiritual state of England in the years 1919 and following.”

In taking a brief look at Canto XIV I hope to shed some light on the deepening malaise of not only the British political class, but rather of the entire gang of whom we are told are today’s world leaders. 

The stench of wet coal, politicians

.........e and  .....n,  their wrists bound to

their ankles,

standing bare bum,

Faces smeared on their rumps,

Wide eye on flat buttock,

Bush hanging for beard,

Addressing crowds through their arse-holes.”

In the above passage there is a consensus amongst both Pound scholars and historians that the e is the last letter of Lloyd George, British prime minister from 1916-1922, and the n for Wilson, the American president, both of whom were not only complicit but directly responsible for the brutality of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War.  There is extant documentation that Lloyd felt dreadfully bad about the conditions of surrender imposed on Germany, but apparently lacked the strength of conviction to do anything other than go along with the others. Wilson was as happy as a pig in shit, as J.P. Morgan and other Wall Street bankers who had financed putting him in the White House assured Woodrow that, “We made money out of destroying Europe and we’ll do it again rebuilding it.”

And the betrayers of language

......n and the press gang

And those who had lied for hire;

the perverts, the perverters of language,

the perverts, who have set money-lust

Before the pleasures of the senses;

howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house’

the clatter of presses,”.

As then, so today the media magnates have the politicians dancing to the tune of the banking elite. At the time Pound wrote this canto England was divided into an upper class, middleclass (not to be confused with the term as used by Americans) and the lowly working class. Today we are being told of yet another class, and they are found from England to Egypt: the underclass. They are those who see no hope. They are rioting, not for bread, but for i-phones, plasma screen TVs and expensive trainers made by poorly paid Chinese workers. The dialectic of Terrorism is giving way to a new media craze – Pro Democracy, spurred on in an unstable Middle East and North Africa by Twitter, Facebook and CNN. And what do they hope for? Maybe to become the next Greece or Portugal or Ireland, as all their natural resources (real wealth) are safely in the hands of multi-nationals with the banks eagerly standing by to offer the indebted governments, backed with no choice in the matter by the servile taxpaying masses, a series of loans wedded to IMF austerity measures. And has it not occurred to any of them that the same people who supported – both financially and militarily - the harsh dictatorships in their countries, are the same ones urging them on to “assert their rights as free people governed by leaders of their own choice?” 

What are you going to do about it? Most people have a noose around their neck and are balanced precariously on a tottering stool. With one slip-up, amounting to two missed pay cheques or a missed welfare cheque, and the stool topples over. People used to avoid the homeless and indigent, ostensibly it was purported, because of the smell, but today, no more so than in major US cities, they hate them. They hate them out of fear that that could be them.

So where are the men of fealty and brotherhood who do not fear for their provision? Where are those that are not duped by a spineless political class chosen by corporate campaign contributors and sold in the media as being “the choice of the people?” And would it not be true that if such men rose up then women of equal courage, or even greater, would stand with them? Just listen to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.

The age of chivalry seems long passed where a man’s honour precedes his desire for profit. There is a word in Qur’anic Arabic, futuwwah, that is the embodiment of these unique qualities of courage, loyalty and the protection of women’s honour. For those most qualified there is the duty of noblesse oblige, and, according to the most trustworthy and blessed of men, the Prophet Muhammad, what disqualified a person from such office was their seeking it! From where will such people emerge? Certainly, do not look to the Arabs as they do not know what this is, nor do they know the very meanings of the words they use everyday. There is the word dawla, which is to the body politic what the circulatory system is to the human body, but with the flow of blood being replaced by the movement of wealth. Yet they call it State – that sustains the hoarding of static wealth by a few, passed into law by a disgraced political class, typically in the name of the many.  They even have a word they call religion whose meaning they have taken from their enemies. The word in Arabic is deen, whose root comes from the word for debt: what you owe. What you owe to your Creator, for He alone has given you life, knowing, seeing and hearing and much more, and also what you owe to other human beings, which are essentially concerned with one’s fiduciary obligations.

I started with Pound and will, therefore, return to him in order to end. Of all the Chinese ideograms, his most treasured was the one of ‘a man standing by his words’: verbal integrity. I too, love that one. Its antonym would describe the stance of today’s political class.