COULD IT BE ONLY COINCIDENCE?

Although lots of Washingtonians know it, very few outside our metropolitan area realise that a very satisfying event is in the making. There is new construction about to begin in earnest in Southeast Washington, D.C. Its symbolic continuity is almost breathtaking. A gigantic new residence is being constructed on the old grounds of Saint Elizabeth Hospital for the Mentally Disturbed. When completed, it will become the new fortress for Homeland Security. A sprawling "campus" is being fashioned for the new American KGB with its Orwellian title.

How do the French put it? The more things change, the more things remain the same!

Now, let me hasten to add that the name I provided is an approximation. We locals have always referenced it as "St. Elizabeth's" or simply, "St. E's." Everyone knew that it was the site where mentally disturbed individuals were placed. However, under pressure from the "Politically Correct Fascist Alliance" ["PCFA"], most never went further than that with the institution's title. In time the exact title of this hospital receded into the dark and hazy parts of the mind. Using it might create "a scene," if a member of the PCFA was at hand to scold about insensitivity.

However, not everone confined to St. E's was crazy. Ezra Pound was tossed into St. E's for political reasons. He was lucky, some think. Nuremberg Trials oversaw the murder of men not too dissimilar from Pound. People who effectively wielded words were thought to be at least as dangerous as Nazi swordsmen. Although Ezra Pound had no part in the Manhattan Project nor in the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, he was consigned to St. E's for about thirteen years for dropping his dangerous views over the radio airwaves. Over that time period, Ezra Pound was visited by the likes of T. S. Elliot and Ernest Hemingway. They weren't the only men of letters who remembered this gifted man. They would not have continued visiting him and writing letters were he, indeed, "mad."

Of course, men such as Elliot and Hemingway were suspicious characters to the F.B.I., which investigated Hemingway and probably Elliot as well. After the F.B.I. became an international investigative arm of the "World Community," there was a need for a more locally-dedicated spy organization. Voila! Entrez-vous L'Homeland Security. Soon it was apparent to all: they don't take no crepe from anyone!

Initially headed by a quazi-Christian Fascist, Homeland Security was soon under the direction of Michael Chertoff. It was rumored that in Russian his name meant "devil" or "damned." As many people observed, he didn't give a damn about the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Ezra Pound was the sort of man that Homeland Security would have viewed as "dangerous." He would have been spied on by the government; he would have been spied on by special interest groups that specialize in "monitoring" Americans who don't share their agenda. Indeed, if Homeland Security's new home has a detention center where dangerous people could be confined, then Ezra Pound, were he still alive, would probably once again find himself confined on old familiar turf.

What was that again? What did the French say? Cha - cha - changes, do they ever really happen at all?