American nightmare

We are those whom the T.V. baby sat

while Moloch was served with ever greater work,

who read Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck and the like,

who grew up in America's universities 

where to breathe the very air was to know the greatness of the time

to feel the power of the age's social ferment...

and then, to do the Bard honor 

by giving our best and most civil performances in our hour upon the stage.

We are, regretful,

that we the land of giants, the much vaunted new world,

is also a place of anarchy, dysfunction, and recently, disease.

Reality is uglier than the mythologies we some times comfort ourselves with;

So it is with America: her dream, and her nightmare