It is easy to see why Ginsberg rejects the system he finds himself trapped in, unwilling to become just another number in a system that keeps itself alive by stealing its inhabitants individuality, by numbing the soul. .
Ginsberg sees this as a fault of America's forefathers, asking Walt Whitman what it was like 100 years ago, if America had already lost its soul. He looks to the past to explain the America that he knew. America was built on a religious Puritan psyche, a belief that God had already determined the elect, no matter what is achieved in life. It was to be the new Eden, before religion was stained by the green print of the dollar. Religion inspired people to work rigidly, but for this they were rewarded with money, and therefore the dollar became worshipped. .
As a result, America taught its children to worship "skyscrapers like endless Jehovahs", "cement and aluminium" not God, nor love, or spirituality. Ginsberg believes that interior and exterior beauty should be currency, asking when can "I buy what I need with my good looks". He believes that love is the currency of the soul, but that America has forgotten this. Furthermore, though slavery is abolished, Ginsberg describes the American citizens as slaves to capitalism, a demon licking their insides raw.
Capitalism "burned cigarette holes" in the American soul, a "narcotic tobacco haze" that Ginsberg denounces, angered by an apparent state of forgetfulness "on the black waters of Lethe" whereby Americans do not remember how to survive without fridges and supermarkets to supply them with the reformed American Dream. Ginsberg takes a political stance against this act of self-harm, protesting against the Eisenhower Regime of a narrow conformist era where happiness is a breakfast of waffles and maple syrup, around a table with a wipe-clean cloth in yellow checks, a mom and dad and two point four perfect children, and 2 cars on the driveway.
