America

The poem is staunchly anti-imperialist and anti-Cold War. Ginsberg views America’s involvement in other countries and its engagement in the Cold War as a fundamental flaw that poisons all aspects of existence. It is a corruption, essentially, and Ginsberg does not hold back his hostility toward American policy. The most famous line of the poem is: “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” (Line 5). But Ginsberg really gets into this issue of the Cold War when he discusses Asia in the second stanza.

Ginsberg wrote this poem a couple of years after the Korean War and a few years before the sending of troops to Vietnam. This poem also comes off the heels of World War II, where the United States fought against the rising Japanese empire and ended up dropping two atomic bombs on the country. At this time, there was a growing sentiment in America, fueled by Cold War paranoia and xenophobia, that Asia was an area of the world not to be trusted and that could become a threat to American supremacy. Ginsberg laments against this focus, using the sarcastic lines, “Asia is rising against me. / I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance” (Lines 47-48), and then contrasting this American fear with America’s inability to recognize its own flaws and threats that exist from within its own borders.