Dickens!  You should be living at this hour!
          America is become Do-the-Boys-Hall
          To blacks, Hispanics, Asiatics, girls, all
          We slur as "Indians", those exiled from power,
          Scions of early Anglo-stock, who cower
          On slag-heaps -- any kids in school who fall
          Prey to "pobs†", and, conformed to what pobs call
          "Math", "literature", "science", "art", must suffer
          Psychic mutilation of the power‡
          That might save us from "Whitehead's occupation§"
          The thrall (he warned us) of dead motives, ideas,
          Goals.  Dickens!  we need you, comic, scoffer,
          Scourge: endow this prison of our nation
          With humor's compassion, the laughter of ideals.  [jh, 1967]

^† pobs: Marshall McLuhan's acronym (in The Medium Is The Message) for "print-oriented bastards".

^‡ powers: the "sensory powers" in the Oppenheimer quotation, given in full: "Out there in the streets are playing children who might solve my top problems in physics, because they still have sensory powers I lost long ago." J. Robert Openheimer (x-y), American physicist, headed the research that created the first nuclear bombs in 1945.

^§ Whitehead's occupation: "Any civilization that does not free itself of its outworn ideas is doomed to sterility."