Paracultural Calendar for April 18

[Mark Thibodeau]

On this day in *1958*, a United States federal court rules that American
poet *Ezra Pound* should be released from St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric
Hospital, the asylum where he'd been held since the end of World War II for
making pro-Fascist broadcasts on behalf of *Mussolini*, among other insults
to *The Powers That Be*. Prior to the First World War and for a short while
after it, Pound had been one of the most - if not the single most -
influential Western intellectual in the Modern tradition. He helped usher
in the careers of everybody from *T.S. Eliot* and *James Joyce* to *Robert
Frost* and *Ernest Hemingway*. Blaming the meat grinder slaughter of World
War I on international capitalism and usury, he devoted his life to seeking
out a more equitable monetary system and finding an alternative, more
mystical view of life. He thought he'd found the latter in Fascist Italy.
He was wrong, with tragic results.

*****

On this day in *1983*, a suicide bomber detonates a delivery van packed
with 2000 lbs of explosives outside the United States embassy in Beirut,
Lebanon, killing 63 people, mostly embassy and *CIA* staff. It was the
deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission up to that time, and the use
of suicide bombing increased afterwards, culminating in the extremely
destructive attacks on the U.S. Marine and French Paratrooper barracks in
Beirut on October 23 of the same year, in which 299 French and American
soldiers lost their lives.
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