He was the recognized opposition for twelve years while Hamilton and his pals were engaged in betraying the people, betraying them honestly, sincerely with a firm conviction that it was their duty to make the thirteen
colonies
into the closest possible imitation of Britain.
Pound-Jefferson-and-or-Mussolini
Furguson.
A book I wrote in Feb.
1933 is still unprinted.
I console myself with the fact that Van Buren wrote his memoirs in the 186o's and they got into print only in 19z0.
Control of credit seems in that case to have delayed quite a lot of news about bank method.
On Oct. 6th of the year current (anno XII) between 4- P. M. and 4--30 Mussolini speaking very clearly four or five words . at a time, with a pause, quite a long pause, between phrases, to let it sink in, told 4-0 million Italians together with auditors in the U. S. A. and" the Argentine that the problem of production was solved, and that thev could now turn their minds . to dis- tribution. ? ?
It is just as well that such statements should have reached the general public.
Distribution is effected by means of small bits of paper, many of those bearing one, two and three numerals are for convenience sake carefully engraved, and are (apart from series number) exact replicas of each other as far as human skill can encompass.
Other bits are part printed and partly filled in: by hand.
The science of distribution will progress in measure as people give more attention to these bits of paper, what they are, how they come there, and who governs their creation and transit.
I fail most lamentably at ten ana five year intervals precisely when. I attempt to say something of major interest or importance. Trifles or ideas of third or second line, I can always offer in manner acceptable to my editors. The book I wr~te in Feb.
1933 continues to fall out of date, to recede as its statements are verified by events.
By Oct. '6, ? 1934- we find Mussolini putting the dots on the "i's. " ?
That is to say, finding the unassailable formula, the exact equation for what had been sketchy and impressionistic and exaggerated in Thos. Jefferson's time and expression.
By last April Quirino Capaccioli 1 had already got to a vision of the day when the state could sit back and do nothing. Which sounds again, rather like Jefferson.
1 c~,. ,; Sullo Stalo CorporatitHJ Fasdsta (Fircnzc Sublimtnto Graf. Com? mtrti3lc, Vi3 Cimariua to. Lire S).
? ? ? ? VIII JEFFERSON
I OCT. 6TH OBIT I
Dead, at 4-i4 in the Piazza del Duomo, Milano~ anno XII. Scarcity Economics died;
Scarcity Economics bei. ng that congeries of theories based on an earlier state of human productive capacity. Lest the Duce's Italian have been translated only into set formal phrases it might be well to look at his meaning, and to remember that for XII years the Duce has kept his word whereas it is almost impossible to find a pub~ic man in any other country, European or Ameri- can whose promises are worth yesterday's newspaper.
Lat~oro Garantito, that means that no man in Italy is to have any anxiety about finding a job.
Le Possibi/ita tiel/a ri&hezza, is plural, "science has multiplied the means of producing plenty, and science prodded on by the will of the State should solve the other probem, that of dis- tributing the abundance, and putting an end to the brutal para- dox of grinding poverty amid plenty. "
T h e will o f some states, personified by freshwater p_rofessors or fattened bureaucracies might offer a fairly lean hQpe, but in this case the Stato is sufficiently re-inforced by the human fact of the Duce, who has defined the state as the spirit of the people.
"The indifferent have never made history. "
End of poverty in the Italian peninsula. Distribution is ef- fected by little pieces of paper.
The Duce did not call on his hearers for either more knowl- edge or more intelligence, he asked for "energie e r10/onta" (both in the plural).
"Self-discipline not only of entrepreneurs but of workmen," with a correction of all that is vague and impressionistic in Jeffer- son's phrasing "equality in respect to work and to the nation. Difference only in the grade and fullness of individual respon?
sibility. "
Thus plugging the leak left in all democratic pronounce-
ments.
The more one examines the Milan Speech the. more one is
reminded of Brancusi, the stone blocks from which no error emerges, from whatever angle one look at them.
Lily-Iiver'd letterati might very well exercise their perception of style on this oration.
Just payment, and Ia casa Jecorosa, that means to say ade- quate wages (or perhaps salario doesn't rule out the more recent proposals for distributing exchangeable paper). Decorosa means more than a house fit to live in, it means a house fit to look at.
The Duce who never tries to put in a wedge butt end for?
? and/or MUSSOLINI ix
ward, began this campaign some months ago with the mild state- ment that in So years every peasant should have a house of this kind, or rather he said then ''clean and decent. "
I don't the least think he expects to take So years at it, but he is not given to overstatement.
He must know already what means of distribution exist. Mere plenty is too easy, and the equation of "silk hat and Bradford millionaire " too unpleasant. Purist economists who see the problem as mere algebra, mere bookkeeping, or even mere engineering, will continue to see Italy in a fog. The idea of "nation," the heap big magic of evoking the Urbs Augusta, the Latin numen is too far from 19th century prose, from Sam
Smiles, ? from finance in general. It is possible the Capo del Governo wants to go slow enough so as not to see, in his old age, an Italy full of fat peasants gone rotten and a bourgeoisie stinking over the peninsula as Flaubert saw them stinking through Paris. All this is poesy and has no place in a critical epistle.
This statement will irritate a number of doctrinaire readers, and I hope to continue the process until they can show me at least one other country in which any honest economic legislation occurs, and in which any or. either of the plans for a decent monetary system show any signs of leaving the somewhat airy
'leld of suggestion and taking on legal and concrete existence.
The Criterion. London, January, 1935?
SEPTEMBER PREFACE
T H I S book was written in February (anno XI) when almost nobody "s:1w Roose\? clt coming. " Certainly no letter reached me from America showing any sign of the break. I enquired. A very well-known American editor (call him Ole H. ) replied: "A weak sister. "
Only when I got to Paris in June could I find a trace of anyone's having foreseen. Hickok of the Brooklyn Eagle had had only one tip before March: "Young Vanderbilt" had passed through Paris. He had worked in the Roosevelt campaign and reported that "people didn't know what was coming. " Roose- \clt ? was alive, had political talent, read, knew. Vanderbilt and another chap were out West reporting local opinion, "never succeeded in reporting anything R. didn't already know. Must
have read their reports. Would send in word from say Seattle
EzRA PouND.
? X SEPTEMBER PREFACE
and get reply: 'Don't that contradict what you wrote on the q. th from Des Moines. ' R's habit to lie in bed in the morning with papers spread all over the bed, makes as good a desk as
? ? ? etc. ? ? . "
Certain men have died and I am heartily glad of it, certain
men still live whose death would contribute to my pleasure or at least to a certain mental satisfaction, I mean, such as when the street watering-cart sluices oiF a certain amount of debris;" a few others do, thank hca\? cn, appear less frequently in the papers whose abysmal policies, distortions and perfidies have done their utmost to retard the race.
Recommending the book to a British public I could say, read it in relation to what has happened since 4th March, 1933, ? in the U. S. A. and you may get some faint inkling of what to expect from our country. I don't know that this recommenda- tion is wholly useless even in addressing a great part of the American public. Many of them have apparently never heard of stamp-script; of Wocrgl, of C. H. Douglas, though several new reviews seem busy trying to. tell them.
Many of them, perhaps one might say most of 'em have been \? cry much surpri>d by-i\. tr. Roosc\? elt, and it might do them no harm to try to "place" F. D. R. in relatiCJ! I to contemporary phenomena in other countries.
EzRA PouND.
Kutc: As I write this 18th September, anno XI, there is NO American daily paper contemporary with the F. D. Roosc\? clt administration, there arc se\? eral papers faC! ourab! e to the adminis- tration, but that is not the same thing. There are a couple of weekly and quarterly publications showing some adumbration ofcontcm- porary thought, there is a projected weekly said to be about to be going to be affected by an ex-member of the "brain trust," * there arc lots of old-time bright snappy practical go-getting jour- nalists still worrying about idee1 fixes of their grandfathers' time and wholly unconscious of what is occurring about them, or if not unconscious merely muddled and incomprchcnding. I have never quarrelled with people when their deductions ha\'C been based on fact, I have quarreled when they were based on igno- rance, and my only arguments for z5 years ha\'e been the drag- ging up of facts, either of literature or of history. Journalism as I sec it is history of to-day, and literature is journalism that Jtay1 news.
A. D. 1933 ? ToDAY. Edited by Raymond Moley.
? l
JEFFERSON AND/OR MUSSOLINI
THEfundamental likenesses between these two men are probably greater than their differences. I am not diddling about with a paradox. The top dressing could hardly be more different, everything on the surface is different. The verbal manifestations or at least the more greatly advertised verbal mani- festations undoubtedly differ to a very great degree.
" The best government is that which governs least," remarked Mr. Jefferson. I don't propose to limit my analysis to what T om Jefferson said. I don't propose to limit my analysis to what Tom Jefferson recommended in aparticular time andplace. I am concerned with what he actually did, with the way his mind worked both when faced with a particular problem in a particular geography, and
when faced with the unending problem of CHANGE.
If Mussolini had tried to fool himself into finding or into trying to find the identical solution for Italy 19. 22. -1932. that Jefferson found for America 1776-182. 6, there would have been no fascist decennio.
There is probably no . language simple enough and clear enough to explain this, to make this clear to the American extreme left and to the American liberal. I mean to say that the left is completely,
II
? 1 2 JEFFERSON
I mean completely, absolutely, utterly, and possibly incurably, ignorant of Jefferson ~d nearly ignorant of the structure of American government, both de jure' and de facto. . ?
They understand nothing of this subject because they have no desire to understand it, and practically all political parties are swallowed up in the desire for mutual ignorance of their reciprocal difference.
Jefferson's writings are published in ten volumes but I know of no cheap popular edition of selected and significant passages. Van Buren's autobiography was kept in manuscript up till 1920, not, I imagine, because of a vile conspiracy of bogey-men bankers but simply because the professors of history and economics were too lazy and too ignorant to under- stand its importance. The final hundred pages would have saved America twenty years' trouble had they been printed in 1900. Instead of which our daddies had General Grant. And we have ourselves been spectators, disgusted in the main, o f the undignified procession: Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. ?
The heritage of Jefferson, Quincy Adams', old John Adams, Jackson, Van Buren is HERE, NOW in the Italian peninsula at the beginning of fascist second decennia, not in Massachusetts or Delaware.
To understand this we must have at least a rudi- mentary knowledge of the first fifty years of United States history AND some first-hand knowledge of Italy 1922-;3 or 1915-;3, or still better some knowledge of 16o years of American democracy and of Italy' for as long as you like.
The man least likely, I mean the man in all Europe or in all America least likely, to be surprised
? andfor MUSSOLINI x5
. at my . opening proposition is Benito Mussolini himself.
The popular pictures or caricatures of Jefferson are forgotten. Mr. Ludwig has done a, shall we say, popular picture of the Duce, or shall we say a picture that has been widely distributed. Mr. Ludwig saw in Mussolini exactly what one would expect Mr. Ludwig to see. It is a wonder he didn't ask the Capo del Govemo how much he paid for his neckties. I once knew a traveller in smokers' novelties, very very like Mr. Ludwig in mind and manner. I dare say he also would have been dis- tressed by the Duce, for I cannot at the moment recall (amid all the photos and all the cinema news- reels) I cannot recall any photo of the Duce smoking a fat cigar.
I think Emil would have been just as happy talking to ? Lloyd George or Woodrow, or to those who have afflicted our era and by whom our public
. affai~ have been messed up.
I have myself seen several statesmen, mostly
ignorant and, if not ignorant, either shallow OI shifty; all engaged in passing the buck, or in avoid- ing the question, i. e. ANY question whatsoever.
? II
JEFFERSON
JEFFERSON participated in one revolution, he " informed it " both in the sense of shaping it froni the inside and of educating it.
He tried to educate another. It wasn't technic- ally and officially his business as American Ambas- sador to France, but being Jefferson he couldn't exactly help himself. While fat Louis was. chewing apples at Versailles, Lafayette and Co. kept running down to Tom's lodgings to find out how they ought to behave, and how one should have a French revolution. The royal bed or whatever they called it was toppled over and T. J. went back to the States.
He was the recognized opposition for twelve years while Hamilton and his pals were engaged in betraying the people, betraying them honestly, sincerely with a firm conviction that it was their duty to make the thirteen colonies into the closest possible imitation of Britain.
The handiest guide to this period is Woodward's
Washington, Image and Man.
After that, Jefferson governed our forefathers for twenty-four_ years, and you might almost say he governed for forty-eight. There was the slight cross-current of Quincy Adams, but there was the intensively Jeffersonian drive of Van Buren.
When I say twenty-four years I count Jefferson's 14
? JEFFERSON and/or MUSSOUNI x,
eight years as President and the sixteen wherein he govemed more or less through deputies, Madison and Monroe.
" The best government is that which governs least. " Shallow interpretation puts all the emphasis on the adverb " least" and slides gaily over the verb "to govern. "
? Apart from conversation and persiflage, h(>w did Jefferson govern? What did he really do? Through what mechanisms did he act?
He governed with a limited suffrage, and by means of conversation with his more intelligent friends~ Or rather he guided a limited electorate by what he wrote and said more or less privately.
He canalized American thought by means of his verbal manifestations, and in these manifestations he appeared at times to exaggerate.
The exaggeration had an aim and a scope, tem- porary and immediate. No man in history had ever done more and done it with less violence or with less needless expenditure of energy.
Given the obvious " weakness " of the American colonies AND geography, he committed the greatest single territorial conquest or acquist that either you or I can at. the moment recall. Get out a ruler and see whether Clive by means of cheating and bribing traitors to commit treachery on the actual field of battle mopped up anything larger, irrespective even of the moral stabilities, and lasting contentment.
Yes, there are differences. There always ARE . differences. The exact historical parallel doesn't exist. There is opportunism and opportunism. The
word has a bad meaning because in a world of &fetternichs, and Talleyrands it means doing the
other guy the minute you get the chance.
There is also the opportunism of the artist, who
? t6 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOUNI
has a definite aim, and creates out of the materials present. The greater the artist the more permanent his creation. And this is a matter of WILL.
It is also a matter of the DIRECTION OF THE WILL. And if the reader will blow the fog off his brain and think for a few minutes or a few stray half-hours he will find this phrase brings us ultimately both to Confucius and Dante.
? III DIRECTIO VOLUNT A TIS
T H E whole of the Divina Commedia is a study of the " directio voluntatis " (direction of the will). I mean in its basal sense.
Dante uses an unfortunate terminology. He says that his poem is written in four senses, the literal, the allegorical, the anagogical and the moral. This is as bad as Major Douglas' algebra.
The literal? Oh, well, that's all right. Allegory is very old-fashioned. Anagogical? Hell's bells, " nobody " knows what THA T is. And as for the
? " moral "?
Wedescendfromthepilgrim"farvers. " Amoral
man in New York or Boston is one who objects to anyone else's committing adultery.
I am a flat-chested highbrow. I can "cure" the whole trouble simply by criticism of style. Oh, can I? Yes. I have been saying so for some time.
At any rate if you translate a ? medi:eval Latin word by a modern New England word having the same letters (all but the final e) and having 'em in the same order, you do NOT convey Dante's t;neaning to the reader, and the reader arrives at the conclusion that? Dante was either a prig or a bore. ? .
To cut the cackle, you can have an OPPOR- TUNIST who is RIGHT, that is who has certain
17
? 18 JEFFERSON
convictions and who drives them through circum- stance, or batters and forms circumstance ? with them.
The academic ass exists in a vacuum with a congeries of dead fixed ideas, or with a congeries of fixed ideas which may be " good " and not quite dead, or rather which MIGHT be useful were they brought to focus on something. ?
The word intellect stinks in the normal Americo- English nostril. Even the word intelligence has come to be unsatisfactory.
Let us deny that real intelligence exists until it comes into action.
A man in desperate circumstances, let us say, Remy de Gourmont in pre-war France might get to the point of thinking that an idea is spoiled by being brought into action, but Gourmont also got to the point of cursing intelligence altogether, vide his remarks on the lamb. (Chevaux de Diomede).
He then got round to defining intellect as the fumbling about in the attempt to create instinct, or at any rate on the road towards instinct. And his word instinct came to mean merely PERFECT and complete intelligence with a limited scope applied to recurrent conditions (vide his chapters on insects in La Physique de I'Amour).
The flying ant or wasp or whatever it was that I saw cut up a spider at Excideu_il may have been acting by instinct, but it was not acting by reason of the stupidity of instinct. It was acting with remark- ably full and perfect knowledge which did not have to be chewed out in a New Republic article or avoided in a London Times leader.
When a human being has an analogous com- pleteness of knowledge, or intelligence carried into
? .
a third or fourth dimension, capable of dealing with NEW circumstances, we call it genius.
This arouses any amount of inferiority complex. Coolidge never aroused ANY inferiority complex. Neither did Harding or Hoover.
Jefferson was one genit1s and Mussolini is another. I am not putting in all the steps of my argument but that don't mean to say they aren't there.
Jefferson guided a governing class. A limited number of the public had the franchise. So far as the first sixty or more years of United States history are concerned there was no need for Jefferson even to imagine a time when the more intelligent members of the public would be too stupid or too lazy to exercise their wit in the discharge of their "duty. "
I mean to say T. J. had a feeling of responsibility and he knew other men who had it, it didn't occur to him that this type of man would die out.
John Adams believed in heredity. Jefferson left no sons. Adams left the only line o ( descendants who have steadily and without a break felt their responsibility and persistently participated in Ameri- cangovernment throughout its x6o years.
In one case hereditary privilege would have been use! ess and in the other it hasn't been necessary.
Adanis lived to see an " aristocracy of stock- jobbers and land-jobbers " in action and predicted them . " into time immemorial " (which phrase an ingenious grammarian can by great ingenuity cata- logue and give a name to, by counting in a string of ellipses).
Old John teased Tom about his hyperboles, so he is1fair game for us in this instance.
As to the ratio of property to responsibility, Ben Franklin remarked that some of the worst rascals he had known had been some of the richest.
and/or MUSSOLINI 19
? zo JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
This concept has long since faded from American government and almost from the minds of the people. Hamilton didn't believe it, or at any rate both his Hebrew blood and his Scotch blood coursed violently toward the contrary view.
? IV
THEmodem American cheap sneers at demo- cracy and at some of Jefferson's slogans are based on the assumption that Jefferson's . ideas were idees
fixes.
Attacks on Jefferson's sincerity made during his lifetime were made by the same type of idiot, on precisely the opposite tack. I mean becau'Se they weren't ideuftxes, and because Jefferson was incap- able of just that form of stupidity.
A n idee fixe is a dead, set, stiff, varnished " idea " existing in a vacuum.
The ideas of genius, or of " men of intelligence" are ? organic and germinal, the " seed " of the scriptures.
You put one of these ideas somewhere, i. e. some- where in a definite space and time, and something begins to happen.
"All men are hom free and equal. "
Cheers, bands, band wagons, John stops licking the squire's boots, from the Atlantic strip of the British American colonies to the great port of Marseilles there is a record off-sloughing of inferior-
. ity complex.
The drivelling imbecility of the British and
French . courts ceases to hypnotize all the pore boobs. ? At any rate something gets going.
The idea is as old as ? sop, who said: " We are all sons of Zeus. "
21
? u. JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
Again a little grammar or a little medi::eval scholarship would be useful, Albertus Magnus or Aquinas or some fusty old scribbler passed on an age-old distinction between the verb and the noun.
The verb implies a time, a relation to time. Be Christian, go back to the newer part of your Bible. Be Catholic (not Anglo-Catholic), consider the " mystery of the incarnation. "
I really do not give an underdone damn about your terminology so long as you understand it and don't mess up the meaning of your words. And (we might add) so long as you, as reader, try to under- stand the meaning of the text (whatever text) you read.
As a good reader you will refuse to be bam- boozled, and when a text has no meaning or when it is merely a mess or bluff you will drop it and occupy yourself with good literature (either belles lettres, economic or political).
" What's this got to do with . . . ? "
If the gentle reader wants to think, he can learn how to start from Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese
Written Character.
AND he can learn how to put his thoughts
together in some sort of order from my translation of the Ta Hio (The Great Learning) of Confucius (32. pages and 2. 8 pages respectively).
? v
NOBODY can understand the juxtaposition of the two names Jefferson-Mussolini until they are willing to imagine the transposition:
What would Benito Mussolini have done in the American wilderness in I 770 to I 816?
What would Tom Jefferson do and say in a narrow Mediterranean peninsula containing Foge;ia, Milan, Siracusa, Firenze, with a crusted conservat1sm that no untravelled American can even suspect of existing.
There are in Volterra houses . z. ,ooo years old, and there are in those houses families who have BEEN IN those houses, father to son to grandson, from the time of C:esar Augustus.
And there are Italian intellectuals, and from the time of Tiberius the Italian intelligentzia has been talking about draining the swamps.
AND there are in Italy fascist officials who are trying their best NOT to govern one whit more than is necessary.
Do I find my Podesta trying to be modern? That is to say do I find him trying to get the peasants from two miles up the hill. to behave like American citizens? I mean to say to come to his office or to whatever office they should come to for their particular. business INSTEAD of bringing eggs to his door at six o'clock in the morning in order to render their feudal superior propitious to their views or their miseries or their wangles?
23
? 14 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
Have I gone up and down the by-ways and crannies of this country for more than a decade observing the picturesque overhang of memories and tradition and the idiotic idees fixes of the edu- cated Italian?
And I remark again that the cultured Italian has been talking about draining those god-damned marshes since the time of Tiberius Cesar. And there once was a man named Cola or Nicola da Rienzi.
ANY ass could compare HIM to Tom Jefferson. Or, more justly, to Pat Henry.
A simpatico and most charming seventy-year-old Italian University President said to me, with eulogy in his voice : " The error of my generation was the underestimation of Marx. "
The Italian intelligentsia was amongst the last sections of the public to understand fascism.
Thefascist revolution is inftnite! J more INTEREST- ING than the Russian revolution because it is not a revolution according to preconceived type.
The Italian intelligentsia, like every other incom- petent intelligentsia lived with a lot of set ideas, 1n a vacuum.
Aragon in the best political propagandist poem of our time cheers loudly for the Bolsheviki.
" There are no brakes on the engine. " Banzai. Eljen, etc.
NO brakes on the engine. HOW splendid, how perfectly rippingI
? VI INTELLIGENTSIAS
LENIN did not have the Vatican in his front garden. He knew his Russia and dealt with the Russia he had before him. By comparison a simple equation. I mean by comparison with the States of Italy, the duchies and kingdoms, etc. , united much more recently than our own, and the clotted con- glomerate of snobbisms, sectional feelings and dis- crepancies of cultural level, for on the whole the gap between the old civilization, the specialized cultural heritage of the educated Italian and the uncultured Italian? is probably greater than exists anywhere else or at least, one finds it in sharper contrast.
In one sense they've all got some sort of culture, rnilieniar, forgotten, stuck anywhere from the time of Odysseus to the time of St. Dominic, to the time ofMazzini.
Mrs. B. 's cook is taken to the " mountains," that is to say she is taken uphill about a mile and a quarter, and she weeps with nostalgia for the sea, said sea being clearly visible from the kitchen window.
In twenty minutes I can walk into a community with a different language, the uphills speaking something? nearer Tuscan and the downhills talking Genovesh. IhaveheardanexcitedMilanesecursing the Neapolitan for an African.
25
? z6 JEFFERSON
You may say that this isn't serious or that one can't take it in the literal sense. But under it lies the fact that truth in Milan is anything but truth down in Foggia.
There is the Latin habit of discussing abstract ideas. In America this habit is restricted to the small undesirable class who write for the New Republic and analogous nuisances. In England it is confined to Fabians.
This habit has nothing to do with knowledge or a desire to learn. It is more or less allied to the. desire for eloquence.
I have seen the Italian small shopkeeper in the midst of a verbal soar, utterly unable to attend to a waiting customer until he has delivered his " opinione," rounded out his paragraph for a custo- mer already served.
Language for many of them seems to disgorge itself in huge formed blobs, and nothing but violent shock can impede the disgorgement of, let us say, a three-hundred-word blob, once its emission is started.
Hence the rules of the American Senate, the oriental secular tradition of leisure, etc.
Humanity, Italian and every other segment of it, is not given to seeing the FACT, man sees his own preconception of fact.
It takes a genius charged with some form of dynamite, mental or material, to blast him out of these preconceptions.
" NOI CI FACCIAMO SCANNAR PER MUSSOLINI," said my hotel-keeper in Rimini years ago, thinking I knew nothing about the revolution and wanting to get it into my head. Nothing happens without efficient cause. My hotel-keeper was also Comandante della Piazza,
? andfor MUSSOLINI 1. 7
we had got better acquainted by reason of his sense of responsibility, or his interest in what I was doing. The local librarian had shut up the library, and the Comandante had damn well decided that if I had taken the trouble to come to Romagna to look at a manuscript, the library would cut the red tape.
" Scannar ,, is a very colloquial word meaning to get scragged. It has none of the oratorical quality of " we will die for," but that's what it means. And my friend M. was expressing a simple fact.
On Oct. 6th of the year current (anno XII) between 4- P. M. and 4--30 Mussolini speaking very clearly four or five words . at a time, with a pause, quite a long pause, between phrases, to let it sink in, told 4-0 million Italians together with auditors in the U. S. A. and" the Argentine that the problem of production was solved, and that thev could now turn their minds . to dis- tribution. ? ?
It is just as well that such statements should have reached the general public.
Distribution is effected by means of small bits of paper, many of those bearing one, two and three numerals are for convenience sake carefully engraved, and are (apart from series number) exact replicas of each other as far as human skill can encompass.
Other bits are part printed and partly filled in: by hand.
The science of distribution will progress in measure as people give more attention to these bits of paper, what they are, how they come there, and who governs their creation and transit.
I fail most lamentably at ten ana five year intervals precisely when. I attempt to say something of major interest or importance. Trifles or ideas of third or second line, I can always offer in manner acceptable to my editors. The book I wr~te in Feb.
1933 continues to fall out of date, to recede as its statements are verified by events.
By Oct. '6, ? 1934- we find Mussolini putting the dots on the "i's. " ?
That is to say, finding the unassailable formula, the exact equation for what had been sketchy and impressionistic and exaggerated in Thos. Jefferson's time and expression.
By last April Quirino Capaccioli 1 had already got to a vision of the day when the state could sit back and do nothing. Which sounds again, rather like Jefferson.
1 c~,. ,; Sullo Stalo CorporatitHJ Fasdsta (Fircnzc Sublimtnto Graf. Com? mtrti3lc, Vi3 Cimariua to. Lire S).
? ? ? ? VIII JEFFERSON
I OCT. 6TH OBIT I
Dead, at 4-i4 in the Piazza del Duomo, Milano~ anno XII. Scarcity Economics died;
Scarcity Economics bei. ng that congeries of theories based on an earlier state of human productive capacity. Lest the Duce's Italian have been translated only into set formal phrases it might be well to look at his meaning, and to remember that for XII years the Duce has kept his word whereas it is almost impossible to find a pub~ic man in any other country, European or Ameri- can whose promises are worth yesterday's newspaper.
Lat~oro Garantito, that means that no man in Italy is to have any anxiety about finding a job.
Le Possibi/ita tiel/a ri&hezza, is plural, "science has multiplied the means of producing plenty, and science prodded on by the will of the State should solve the other probem, that of dis- tributing the abundance, and putting an end to the brutal para- dox of grinding poverty amid plenty. "
T h e will o f some states, personified by freshwater p_rofessors or fattened bureaucracies might offer a fairly lean hQpe, but in this case the Stato is sufficiently re-inforced by the human fact of the Duce, who has defined the state as the spirit of the people.
"The indifferent have never made history. "
End of poverty in the Italian peninsula. Distribution is ef- fected by little pieces of paper.
The Duce did not call on his hearers for either more knowl- edge or more intelligence, he asked for "energie e r10/onta" (both in the plural).
"Self-discipline not only of entrepreneurs but of workmen," with a correction of all that is vague and impressionistic in Jeffer- son's phrasing "equality in respect to work and to the nation. Difference only in the grade and fullness of individual respon?
sibility. "
Thus plugging the leak left in all democratic pronounce-
ments.
The more one examines the Milan Speech the. more one is
reminded of Brancusi, the stone blocks from which no error emerges, from whatever angle one look at them.
Lily-Iiver'd letterati might very well exercise their perception of style on this oration.
Just payment, and Ia casa Jecorosa, that means to say ade- quate wages (or perhaps salario doesn't rule out the more recent proposals for distributing exchangeable paper). Decorosa means more than a house fit to live in, it means a house fit to look at.
The Duce who never tries to put in a wedge butt end for?
? and/or MUSSOLINI ix
ward, began this campaign some months ago with the mild state- ment that in So years every peasant should have a house of this kind, or rather he said then ''clean and decent. "
I don't the least think he expects to take So years at it, but he is not given to overstatement.
He must know already what means of distribution exist. Mere plenty is too easy, and the equation of "silk hat and Bradford millionaire " too unpleasant. Purist economists who see the problem as mere algebra, mere bookkeeping, or even mere engineering, will continue to see Italy in a fog. The idea of "nation," the heap big magic of evoking the Urbs Augusta, the Latin numen is too far from 19th century prose, from Sam
Smiles, ? from finance in general. It is possible the Capo del Governo wants to go slow enough so as not to see, in his old age, an Italy full of fat peasants gone rotten and a bourgeoisie stinking over the peninsula as Flaubert saw them stinking through Paris. All this is poesy and has no place in a critical epistle.
This statement will irritate a number of doctrinaire readers, and I hope to continue the process until they can show me at least one other country in which any honest economic legislation occurs, and in which any or. either of the plans for a decent monetary system show any signs of leaving the somewhat airy
'leld of suggestion and taking on legal and concrete existence.
The Criterion. London, January, 1935?
SEPTEMBER PREFACE
T H I S book was written in February (anno XI) when almost nobody "s:1w Roose\? clt coming. " Certainly no letter reached me from America showing any sign of the break. I enquired. A very well-known American editor (call him Ole H. ) replied: "A weak sister. "
Only when I got to Paris in June could I find a trace of anyone's having foreseen. Hickok of the Brooklyn Eagle had had only one tip before March: "Young Vanderbilt" had passed through Paris. He had worked in the Roosevelt campaign and reported that "people didn't know what was coming. " Roose- \clt ? was alive, had political talent, read, knew. Vanderbilt and another chap were out West reporting local opinion, "never succeeded in reporting anything R. didn't already know. Must
have read their reports. Would send in word from say Seattle
EzRA PouND.
? X SEPTEMBER PREFACE
and get reply: 'Don't that contradict what you wrote on the q. th from Des Moines. ' R's habit to lie in bed in the morning with papers spread all over the bed, makes as good a desk as
? ? ? etc. ? ? . "
Certain men have died and I am heartily glad of it, certain
men still live whose death would contribute to my pleasure or at least to a certain mental satisfaction, I mean, such as when the street watering-cart sluices oiF a certain amount of debris;" a few others do, thank hca\? cn, appear less frequently in the papers whose abysmal policies, distortions and perfidies have done their utmost to retard the race.
Recommending the book to a British public I could say, read it in relation to what has happened since 4th March, 1933, ? in the U. S. A. and you may get some faint inkling of what to expect from our country. I don't know that this recommenda- tion is wholly useless even in addressing a great part of the American public. Many of them have apparently never heard of stamp-script; of Wocrgl, of C. H. Douglas, though several new reviews seem busy trying to. tell them.
Many of them, perhaps one might say most of 'em have been \? cry much surpri>d by-i\. tr. Roosc\? elt, and it might do them no harm to try to "place" F. D. R. in relatiCJ! I to contemporary phenomena in other countries.
EzRA PouND.
Kutc: As I write this 18th September, anno XI, there is NO American daily paper contemporary with the F. D. Roosc\? clt administration, there arc se\? eral papers faC! ourab! e to the adminis- tration, but that is not the same thing. There are a couple of weekly and quarterly publications showing some adumbration ofcontcm- porary thought, there is a projected weekly said to be about to be going to be affected by an ex-member of the "brain trust," * there arc lots of old-time bright snappy practical go-getting jour- nalists still worrying about idee1 fixes of their grandfathers' time and wholly unconscious of what is occurring about them, or if not unconscious merely muddled and incomprchcnding. I have never quarrelled with people when their deductions ha\'C been based on fact, I have quarreled when they were based on igno- rance, and my only arguments for z5 years ha\'e been the drag- ging up of facts, either of literature or of history. Journalism as I sec it is history of to-day, and literature is journalism that Jtay1 news.
A. D. 1933 ? ToDAY. Edited by Raymond Moley.
? l
JEFFERSON AND/OR MUSSOLINI
THEfundamental likenesses between these two men are probably greater than their differences. I am not diddling about with a paradox. The top dressing could hardly be more different, everything on the surface is different. The verbal manifestations or at least the more greatly advertised verbal mani- festations undoubtedly differ to a very great degree.
" The best government is that which governs least," remarked Mr. Jefferson. I don't propose to limit my analysis to what T om Jefferson said. I don't propose to limit my analysis to what Tom Jefferson recommended in aparticular time andplace. I am concerned with what he actually did, with the way his mind worked both when faced with a particular problem in a particular geography, and
when faced with the unending problem of CHANGE.
If Mussolini had tried to fool himself into finding or into trying to find the identical solution for Italy 19. 22. -1932. that Jefferson found for America 1776-182. 6, there would have been no fascist decennio.
There is probably no . language simple enough and clear enough to explain this, to make this clear to the American extreme left and to the American liberal. I mean to say that the left is completely,
II
? 1 2 JEFFERSON
I mean completely, absolutely, utterly, and possibly incurably, ignorant of Jefferson ~d nearly ignorant of the structure of American government, both de jure' and de facto. . ?
They understand nothing of this subject because they have no desire to understand it, and practically all political parties are swallowed up in the desire for mutual ignorance of their reciprocal difference.
Jefferson's writings are published in ten volumes but I know of no cheap popular edition of selected and significant passages. Van Buren's autobiography was kept in manuscript up till 1920, not, I imagine, because of a vile conspiracy of bogey-men bankers but simply because the professors of history and economics were too lazy and too ignorant to under- stand its importance. The final hundred pages would have saved America twenty years' trouble had they been printed in 1900. Instead of which our daddies had General Grant. And we have ourselves been spectators, disgusted in the main, o f the undignified procession: Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. ?
The heritage of Jefferson, Quincy Adams', old John Adams, Jackson, Van Buren is HERE, NOW in the Italian peninsula at the beginning of fascist second decennia, not in Massachusetts or Delaware.
To understand this we must have at least a rudi- mentary knowledge of the first fifty years of United States history AND some first-hand knowledge of Italy 1922-;3 or 1915-;3, or still better some knowledge of 16o years of American democracy and of Italy' for as long as you like.
The man least likely, I mean the man in all Europe or in all America least likely, to be surprised
? andfor MUSSOLINI x5
. at my . opening proposition is Benito Mussolini himself.
The popular pictures or caricatures of Jefferson are forgotten. Mr. Ludwig has done a, shall we say, popular picture of the Duce, or shall we say a picture that has been widely distributed. Mr. Ludwig saw in Mussolini exactly what one would expect Mr. Ludwig to see. It is a wonder he didn't ask the Capo del Govemo how much he paid for his neckties. I once knew a traveller in smokers' novelties, very very like Mr. Ludwig in mind and manner. I dare say he also would have been dis- tressed by the Duce, for I cannot at the moment recall (amid all the photos and all the cinema news- reels) I cannot recall any photo of the Duce smoking a fat cigar.
I think Emil would have been just as happy talking to ? Lloyd George or Woodrow, or to those who have afflicted our era and by whom our public
. affai~ have been messed up.
I have myself seen several statesmen, mostly
ignorant and, if not ignorant, either shallow OI shifty; all engaged in passing the buck, or in avoid- ing the question, i. e. ANY question whatsoever.
? II
JEFFERSON
JEFFERSON participated in one revolution, he " informed it " both in the sense of shaping it froni the inside and of educating it.
He tried to educate another. It wasn't technic- ally and officially his business as American Ambas- sador to France, but being Jefferson he couldn't exactly help himself. While fat Louis was. chewing apples at Versailles, Lafayette and Co. kept running down to Tom's lodgings to find out how they ought to behave, and how one should have a French revolution. The royal bed or whatever they called it was toppled over and T. J. went back to the States.
He was the recognized opposition for twelve years while Hamilton and his pals were engaged in betraying the people, betraying them honestly, sincerely with a firm conviction that it was their duty to make the thirteen colonies into the closest possible imitation of Britain.
The handiest guide to this period is Woodward's
Washington, Image and Man.
After that, Jefferson governed our forefathers for twenty-four_ years, and you might almost say he governed for forty-eight. There was the slight cross-current of Quincy Adams, but there was the intensively Jeffersonian drive of Van Buren.
When I say twenty-four years I count Jefferson's 14
? JEFFERSON and/or MUSSOUNI x,
eight years as President and the sixteen wherein he govemed more or less through deputies, Madison and Monroe.
" The best government is that which governs least. " Shallow interpretation puts all the emphasis on the adverb " least" and slides gaily over the verb "to govern. "
? Apart from conversation and persiflage, h(>w did Jefferson govern? What did he really do? Through what mechanisms did he act?
He governed with a limited suffrage, and by means of conversation with his more intelligent friends~ Or rather he guided a limited electorate by what he wrote and said more or less privately.
He canalized American thought by means of his verbal manifestations, and in these manifestations he appeared at times to exaggerate.
The exaggeration had an aim and a scope, tem- porary and immediate. No man in history had ever done more and done it with less violence or with less needless expenditure of energy.
Given the obvious " weakness " of the American colonies AND geography, he committed the greatest single territorial conquest or acquist that either you or I can at. the moment recall. Get out a ruler and see whether Clive by means of cheating and bribing traitors to commit treachery on the actual field of battle mopped up anything larger, irrespective even of the moral stabilities, and lasting contentment.
Yes, there are differences. There always ARE . differences. The exact historical parallel doesn't exist. There is opportunism and opportunism. The
word has a bad meaning because in a world of &fetternichs, and Talleyrands it means doing the
other guy the minute you get the chance.
There is also the opportunism of the artist, who
? t6 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOUNI
has a definite aim, and creates out of the materials present. The greater the artist the more permanent his creation. And this is a matter of WILL.
It is also a matter of the DIRECTION OF THE WILL. And if the reader will blow the fog off his brain and think for a few minutes or a few stray half-hours he will find this phrase brings us ultimately both to Confucius and Dante.
? III DIRECTIO VOLUNT A TIS
T H E whole of the Divina Commedia is a study of the " directio voluntatis " (direction of the will). I mean in its basal sense.
Dante uses an unfortunate terminology. He says that his poem is written in four senses, the literal, the allegorical, the anagogical and the moral. This is as bad as Major Douglas' algebra.
The literal? Oh, well, that's all right. Allegory is very old-fashioned. Anagogical? Hell's bells, " nobody " knows what THA T is. And as for the
? " moral "?
Wedescendfromthepilgrim"farvers. " Amoral
man in New York or Boston is one who objects to anyone else's committing adultery.
I am a flat-chested highbrow. I can "cure" the whole trouble simply by criticism of style. Oh, can I? Yes. I have been saying so for some time.
At any rate if you translate a ? medi:eval Latin word by a modern New England word having the same letters (all but the final e) and having 'em in the same order, you do NOT convey Dante's t;neaning to the reader, and the reader arrives at the conclusion that? Dante was either a prig or a bore. ? .
To cut the cackle, you can have an OPPOR- TUNIST who is RIGHT, that is who has certain
17
? 18 JEFFERSON
convictions and who drives them through circum- stance, or batters and forms circumstance ? with them.
The academic ass exists in a vacuum with a congeries of dead fixed ideas, or with a congeries of fixed ideas which may be " good " and not quite dead, or rather which MIGHT be useful were they brought to focus on something. ?
The word intellect stinks in the normal Americo- English nostril. Even the word intelligence has come to be unsatisfactory.
Let us deny that real intelligence exists until it comes into action.
A man in desperate circumstances, let us say, Remy de Gourmont in pre-war France might get to the point of thinking that an idea is spoiled by being brought into action, but Gourmont also got to the point of cursing intelligence altogether, vide his remarks on the lamb. (Chevaux de Diomede).
He then got round to defining intellect as the fumbling about in the attempt to create instinct, or at any rate on the road towards instinct. And his word instinct came to mean merely PERFECT and complete intelligence with a limited scope applied to recurrent conditions (vide his chapters on insects in La Physique de I'Amour).
The flying ant or wasp or whatever it was that I saw cut up a spider at Excideu_il may have been acting by instinct, but it was not acting by reason of the stupidity of instinct. It was acting with remark- ably full and perfect knowledge which did not have to be chewed out in a New Republic article or avoided in a London Times leader.
When a human being has an analogous com- pleteness of knowledge, or intelligence carried into
? .
a third or fourth dimension, capable of dealing with NEW circumstances, we call it genius.
This arouses any amount of inferiority complex. Coolidge never aroused ANY inferiority complex. Neither did Harding or Hoover.
Jefferson was one genit1s and Mussolini is another. I am not putting in all the steps of my argument but that don't mean to say they aren't there.
Jefferson guided a governing class. A limited number of the public had the franchise. So far as the first sixty or more years of United States history are concerned there was no need for Jefferson even to imagine a time when the more intelligent members of the public would be too stupid or too lazy to exercise their wit in the discharge of their "duty. "
I mean to say T. J. had a feeling of responsibility and he knew other men who had it, it didn't occur to him that this type of man would die out.
John Adams believed in heredity. Jefferson left no sons. Adams left the only line o ( descendants who have steadily and without a break felt their responsibility and persistently participated in Ameri- cangovernment throughout its x6o years.
In one case hereditary privilege would have been use! ess and in the other it hasn't been necessary.
Adanis lived to see an " aristocracy of stock- jobbers and land-jobbers " in action and predicted them . " into time immemorial " (which phrase an ingenious grammarian can by great ingenuity cata- logue and give a name to, by counting in a string of ellipses).
Old John teased Tom about his hyperboles, so he is1fair game for us in this instance.
As to the ratio of property to responsibility, Ben Franklin remarked that some of the worst rascals he had known had been some of the richest.
and/or MUSSOLINI 19
? zo JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
This concept has long since faded from American government and almost from the minds of the people. Hamilton didn't believe it, or at any rate both his Hebrew blood and his Scotch blood coursed violently toward the contrary view.
? IV
THEmodem American cheap sneers at demo- cracy and at some of Jefferson's slogans are based on the assumption that Jefferson's . ideas were idees
fixes.
Attacks on Jefferson's sincerity made during his lifetime were made by the same type of idiot, on precisely the opposite tack. I mean becau'Se they weren't ideuftxes, and because Jefferson was incap- able of just that form of stupidity.
A n idee fixe is a dead, set, stiff, varnished " idea " existing in a vacuum.
The ideas of genius, or of " men of intelligence" are ? organic and germinal, the " seed " of the scriptures.
You put one of these ideas somewhere, i. e. some- where in a definite space and time, and something begins to happen.
"All men are hom free and equal. "
Cheers, bands, band wagons, John stops licking the squire's boots, from the Atlantic strip of the British American colonies to the great port of Marseilles there is a record off-sloughing of inferior-
. ity complex.
The drivelling imbecility of the British and
French . courts ceases to hypnotize all the pore boobs. ? At any rate something gets going.
The idea is as old as ? sop, who said: " We are all sons of Zeus. "
21
? u. JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
Again a little grammar or a little medi::eval scholarship would be useful, Albertus Magnus or Aquinas or some fusty old scribbler passed on an age-old distinction between the verb and the noun.
The verb implies a time, a relation to time. Be Christian, go back to the newer part of your Bible. Be Catholic (not Anglo-Catholic), consider the " mystery of the incarnation. "
I really do not give an underdone damn about your terminology so long as you understand it and don't mess up the meaning of your words. And (we might add) so long as you, as reader, try to under- stand the meaning of the text (whatever text) you read.
As a good reader you will refuse to be bam- boozled, and when a text has no meaning or when it is merely a mess or bluff you will drop it and occupy yourself with good literature (either belles lettres, economic or political).
" What's this got to do with . . . ? "
If the gentle reader wants to think, he can learn how to start from Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese
Written Character.
AND he can learn how to put his thoughts
together in some sort of order from my translation of the Ta Hio (The Great Learning) of Confucius (32. pages and 2. 8 pages respectively).
? v
NOBODY can understand the juxtaposition of the two names Jefferson-Mussolini until they are willing to imagine the transposition:
What would Benito Mussolini have done in the American wilderness in I 770 to I 816?
What would Tom Jefferson do and say in a narrow Mediterranean peninsula containing Foge;ia, Milan, Siracusa, Firenze, with a crusted conservat1sm that no untravelled American can even suspect of existing.
There are in Volterra houses . z. ,ooo years old, and there are in those houses families who have BEEN IN those houses, father to son to grandson, from the time of C:esar Augustus.
And there are Italian intellectuals, and from the time of Tiberius the Italian intelligentzia has been talking about draining the swamps.
AND there are in Italy fascist officials who are trying their best NOT to govern one whit more than is necessary.
Do I find my Podesta trying to be modern? That is to say do I find him trying to get the peasants from two miles up the hill. to behave like American citizens? I mean to say to come to his office or to whatever office they should come to for their particular. business INSTEAD of bringing eggs to his door at six o'clock in the morning in order to render their feudal superior propitious to their views or their miseries or their wangles?
23
? 14 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
Have I gone up and down the by-ways and crannies of this country for more than a decade observing the picturesque overhang of memories and tradition and the idiotic idees fixes of the edu- cated Italian?
And I remark again that the cultured Italian has been talking about draining those god-damned marshes since the time of Tiberius Cesar. And there once was a man named Cola or Nicola da Rienzi.
ANY ass could compare HIM to Tom Jefferson. Or, more justly, to Pat Henry.
A simpatico and most charming seventy-year-old Italian University President said to me, with eulogy in his voice : " The error of my generation was the underestimation of Marx. "
The Italian intelligentsia was amongst the last sections of the public to understand fascism.
Thefascist revolution is inftnite! J more INTEREST- ING than the Russian revolution because it is not a revolution according to preconceived type.
The Italian intelligentsia, like every other incom- petent intelligentsia lived with a lot of set ideas, 1n a vacuum.
Aragon in the best political propagandist poem of our time cheers loudly for the Bolsheviki.
" There are no brakes on the engine. " Banzai. Eljen, etc.
NO brakes on the engine. HOW splendid, how perfectly rippingI
? VI INTELLIGENTSIAS
LENIN did not have the Vatican in his front garden. He knew his Russia and dealt with the Russia he had before him. By comparison a simple equation. I mean by comparison with the States of Italy, the duchies and kingdoms, etc. , united much more recently than our own, and the clotted con- glomerate of snobbisms, sectional feelings and dis- crepancies of cultural level, for on the whole the gap between the old civilization, the specialized cultural heritage of the educated Italian and the uncultured Italian? is probably greater than exists anywhere else or at least, one finds it in sharper contrast.
In one sense they've all got some sort of culture, rnilieniar, forgotten, stuck anywhere from the time of Odysseus to the time of St. Dominic, to the time ofMazzini.
Mrs. B. 's cook is taken to the " mountains," that is to say she is taken uphill about a mile and a quarter, and she weeps with nostalgia for the sea, said sea being clearly visible from the kitchen window.
In twenty minutes I can walk into a community with a different language, the uphills speaking something? nearer Tuscan and the downhills talking Genovesh. IhaveheardanexcitedMilanesecursing the Neapolitan for an African.
25
? z6 JEFFERSON
You may say that this isn't serious or that one can't take it in the literal sense. But under it lies the fact that truth in Milan is anything but truth down in Foggia.
There is the Latin habit of discussing abstract ideas. In America this habit is restricted to the small undesirable class who write for the New Republic and analogous nuisances. In England it is confined to Fabians.
This habit has nothing to do with knowledge or a desire to learn. It is more or less allied to the. desire for eloquence.
I have seen the Italian small shopkeeper in the midst of a verbal soar, utterly unable to attend to a waiting customer until he has delivered his " opinione," rounded out his paragraph for a custo- mer already served.
Language for many of them seems to disgorge itself in huge formed blobs, and nothing but violent shock can impede the disgorgement of, let us say, a three-hundred-word blob, once its emission is started.
Hence the rules of the American Senate, the oriental secular tradition of leisure, etc.
Humanity, Italian and every other segment of it, is not given to seeing the FACT, man sees his own preconception of fact.
It takes a genius charged with some form of dynamite, mental or material, to blast him out of these preconceptions.
" NOI CI FACCIAMO SCANNAR PER MUSSOLINI," said my hotel-keeper in Rimini years ago, thinking I knew nothing about the revolution and wanting to get it into my head. Nothing happens without efficient cause. My hotel-keeper was also Comandante della Piazza,
? andfor MUSSOLINI 1. 7
we had got better acquainted by reason of his sense of responsibility, or his interest in what I was doing. The local librarian had shut up the library, and the Comandante had damn well decided that if I had taken the trouble to come to Romagna to look at a manuscript, the library would cut the red tape.
" Scannar ,, is a very colloquial word meaning to get scragged. It has none of the oratorical quality of " we will die for," but that's what it means. And my friend M. was expressing a simple fact.
