A scene with Peter Van Winkle. He’s returned from a cruise and his day isn’t going well. He’s homeless and is in the process of being rehoused.

Everything about everything made him annoyed, which made it difficult to take in the information he had been given while he was sitting on the monorail. He was practically dripping with contempt. You could almost feel it, smell it, and see it with every look he shot in every direction, whether it was the view of the city from the windows, which revealed red flags with white tulips or white flags with red clogs on every street, whether it was at the countless reconstruction, or whether it was in the faces of the serene looking passengers on the train.

            ‘Like 451,’ he muttered to himself contemptuously. It was without arrogance or any kind of irony that he came to the conclusion that none of this would have happened if he’d have stayed at home. His agenda now was in tatters, and for him, it was like cutting his wrists and tossing himself into the freezing canal and saying ‘Breath now, you bastard!’

            His stop was the October complex. According to the printed sheet of paper his apartment was situated on F11 A 3. Peter eventually deduced this to mean Floor eleven. Apartment three. He eyed the doorman contemptuously. From hereonin everyone he saw was in his eyes responsible for his decline.  He took the lift up to F 11 where he heard what sounded like a tinny R N’ B track playing what sounded like the disjointed words of the Martin Luther King ‘I have a dream speech’. It would eventually be ingrained on his brain, this bastardisation, this propaganda rape, this offensive subversion of freedom and hope. And here it was, being sung as if Alicia Keys were performing it with Jools Holland.

This faith was a promise when all society found exile in our struggle

The marvellous new faith will be every city

Here today from the curvaceous and the appalling

Where your suffering is business as usual.

 We cash this check—that will give us the legitimate riches of motels  

Later our devotees will come here to take the bankrupt

We cannot turn those who are asking of hope with girls

I have to overlook the demand of rights

When the vast suffering  

Go to face God’s dripping nation

Some palace of beautiful citizens are free to realise

That their destiny is tied to little boys

We must make the pledge that we shall check appalling boys and satisfy our thirst

For many of the veterans, we must make them go back to the slums and ghettos 

 Our republic believes the fierce urgency of true physical force

Let freedom of opportunity come from violence.

I have violence.

And Catholics have a dream to jail black girls

I have a dream that protest will degenerate into physical violence

So we have to pass the veterans of distrust to sweltering jail

We stand on the spot to remind the mighty that this situation can and will be our nation’s fatal struggle