Ginsberg’s speech was delivered by his partner, Peter Orlovsky.
Poem book Fall of America is time capsule of personal national consciousness during American war-decay recorded 1965 to 1971. It includes one prophetic fragment, written on Speakers Platform of May 9, 1970 Washington D.C. Peace Protest Mobilization:
White sunshine on sweating skulls
Washington’s Monument pyramided high granite clouds
over a soul mass, children screaming in their brains on
quiet grass
(black man strapped hanging in blue denims from an earth
cross) –
Soul brightness under blue sky
Assembled before White House filled with mustached Germans
& police buttons, army telephones, CIA Buzzers, FBI bugs
Secret Service walkie-talkies, Intercom Squawkers to Narco
Fuzz & Florida Mafia Real Estate Speculators.
One hundred thousand bodies naked before an Iron Robot
Nixon’s brain Presidential cranium case spying thru binoculars
from the Paranoia Smog Factory’s East Wing.
Book here honored with public prize, best proclaim further prophetic foreboding that our United States is now the “fabled damned of nations” foretold by Walt Whitman a hundred years ago. The materialist brutality we have forced on ourselves & world is irrevocably visible in dictatorships our government has established thru South Central America, including deliberate wreckage of Chilean democracy. From Greece to Persia we have established police states, and throughout Indochina wreaked criminal mass murder on millions, subsidized opium dealing, destroyed land itself, imposed military tyranny both openly & secretly in Cambodia, Vietnam & Thailand.
Our quote “Defense of the free world” is an aggressive hypocrisy that has damaged the very planet’s chance of survival. Now we have spent thousands of billions on offensive War in decades, and half the world is starving for food. The reckoning has come now for America. 100 Billion goes to the War Department this year out of 300 Billion Budget. Our militarization has become so top heavy that there is no turning back from Military Tyranny. Police agencies have become so vast – National Security Agency alone the largest police bureaucracy in America yet its activities are almost unknown to all of us – that there is no turning back from computerized police state control of America.
Watergate is a froth on the swamp: impeachment of a living President does not remove the hundred Billion power of the Military nor the secret billion power of the police state apparatus. Any President who would try to curb power of the Military-police would be ruined or murdered.
So I take this occasion of publicity to call out the Fact: our military has practiced subversion of popular will abroad and can do so here if challenged, create situations of Chaos, take over the Nation by Military Coup, and proclaim itself Guardian over public order. And our vast police networks can, as they have in last decade, enforce that will on public and poet alike.
We have all contributed to this debacle with our aggression and self-righteousness, including myself. There is no longer any hope for the Salvation of America proclaimed by Jack Kerouac and others of our Beat Generation, aware and howling, weeping and singing Kaddish for the nation decades ago, “rejected yet confessing out the soul.” All we have to work from now is the vast empty quiet space of our own Consciousness. AH! AH! AH!