Allen Ginsberg's

Independence Day
Manifesto
[from Deliberate Prose (HarperCollins,
2000)]
Chapter One
Politics and Prophecies
Political Life
Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs
or
Independence Day Manifesto
Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of
mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that
unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares
with his Creator. The suppression of contemplative individuality is nearly
complete.
The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to
our senses through systems of mass communication.
These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal
sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.
At the same time there is a crack in the mass consciousness of America -- sudden
emergence of insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld filled with
nerve gases, universal death bombs, malevolent bureaucracies, secret police
systems, drugs that open the door to God, ships leaving Earth, unknown chemical
terrors, evil dreams at hand.

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially

acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious
life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.
America is having a nervous breakdown. Poetry is the record of individual
insights into the secret soul of the individual and because all individuals are one
in the eyes of their creator, into the soul of the world. The world has a soul.
America is having a nervous breakdown. San Francisco is one of many places
where a few individuals, poets, have had the luck and courage and fate to glimpse
something new through the crack in mass consciousness; they have been exposed
to some insight into their own nature, the nature of the governments, and the
nature of God.
Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide,
secrecy and public gaiety among the poets of the city. Those of the general
populace whose individual perception is sufficiently weak to be formed by
stereotypes of mass communication disapprove and deny the insight. The police
and newspapers have moved in, mad movie manufacturers from Hollywood are
at this moment preparing bestial stereotypes of the scene.
The poets and those who share their activities, or exhibit some sign of dress, hair,
or demeanor of understanding, or hipness, are ridiculed. Those of us who have
used certain benevolent drugs (marijuana) to alter our consciousness in order to
gain insight are hunted down in the street by police. Peyote, an historic visionproducing agent, is prohibited on pain of arrest. Those who have used opiates and
junk are threatened with permanent jail and death. To be a junky in America is
like having been a Jew in Nazi Germany.
A huge sadistic police bureaucracy has risen in every state, encouraged by the
central government, to persecute the illuminati, to brainwash the public with
official lies about the drugs, and to terrify and destroy those addicts whose
spiritual search has made them sick.
Deviants from the mass sexual stereotype, quietists, those who will not work for
money, or fib and make arms for hire, or join armies in murder and threat, those
who wish to loaf, think, rest in visions, act beautifully on their own, speak
truthfully in public, inspired by Democracy -- what is their psychic fate now in
America? An America, the greater portion of whose economy is yoked to mental
and mechanical preparations for war?
Literature expressing these insights has been mocked, misinterpreted, and
suppressed by a horde of middlemen whose fearful allegiance to the organization
of mass stereotype communication prevents them from sympathy (not only with

their own inner nature but) with any manifestation of unconditioned individuality.
I mean journalists, commercial publishers, book-review fellows, multitudes of
professors of literature, etc., etc. Poetry is hated. Whole schools of academic
criticism have risen to prove that human consciousness of unconditioned spirit is
a myth. A poetic renaissance glimpsed in San Francisco has been responded to
with ugliness, anger, jealousy, vitriol, sullen protestations of superiority.
And violence. By police, by customs officials, post-office employees, by trustees
of great universities. By anyone whose love of power has led him to a position
where he can push other people around over a difference of opinion -- or vision.
The stakes are too great-an America gone mad with materialism, a police-state
America, a sexless and soulless America prepared to battle the world in defense
of a false image of its authority. Not the wild and beautiful America of the
comrades of Walt Whitman, not the historic America of William Blake and Henry
David Thoreau where the spiritual independence of each individual was an
America, a universe, more huge and awesome than all the abstract bureaucracies
and authoritative officialdoms of the world combined.
Only those who have entered the world of spirit know what a vast laugh there is
in the illusory appearance of worldly authority. And all men at one time or other
enter that Spirit, whether in life or death.
How many hypocrites are there in America? How many trembling lambs, fearful
of discovery? What authority have we set up over ourselves, that we are not as
we are? Who shall prohibit an art from being published to the world? What
conspirators have power to determine our mode of consciousness, our sexual
enjoyments, our different labors and our loves? What fiends determine our wars?
When will we discover an America that will not deny its own God? Who takes up
arms, money, police, and a million hands to murder the consciousness of God?
Who spits in the beautiful face of poetry which sings of the glory of God and
weeps in the dust of the world?

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