Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro



Dystopia and freedoms anthologycenter-206388ContentsFiction TextsI am Legend (Extract 1) – Richard Matheson3I am Legend (Extract 2) – Richard Matheson4Fahrenheit 451 (Extract 1 ) – Ray Bradbury5Fahrenheit 451 (Extract 2) – Ray Bradbury6Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood7The Road – Cormac McCarthy8The Maze Runner – James Dashner9The Giver – Lois Lowry10Delirium – Lauren Oliver11A Handmaid’s Tale (Extract 1) – Margaret Atwood12A Handmaid’s Tale (Extract 2) – Margaret Atwood131984 – George Orwell14Brave New World – Aldous Huxley15Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll16War of the Worlds – HG Wells17The Time Machine – HG Wells18There Will Come Soft Rains – Ray Bradbury19Harrison Bergeron – Kurt Vonnegut Jr23Non-Fiction TextsDismaland is a Smug, Clichéd Monument29Banksy Dismaland Review33Are Children Consuming Too much Digital Technology35Reasons Technology Should be Allowed in the Classroom3800ContentsFiction TextsI am Legend (Extract 1) – Richard Matheson3I am Legend (Extract 2) – Richard Matheson4Fahrenheit 451 (Extract 1 ) – Ray Bradbury5Fahrenheit 451 (Extract 2) – Ray Bradbury6Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood7The Road – Cormac McCarthy8The Maze Runner – James Dashner9The Giver – Lois Lowry10Delirium – Lauren Oliver11A Handmaid’s Tale (Extract 1) – Margaret Atwood12A Handmaid’s Tale (Extract 2) – Margaret Atwood131984 – George Orwell14Brave New World – Aldous Huxley15Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll16War of the Worlds – HG Wells17The Time Machine – HG Wells18There Will Come Soft Rains – Ray Bradbury19Harrison Bergeron – Kurt Vonnegut Jr23Non-Fiction TextsDismaland is a Smug, Clichéd Monument29Banksy Dismaland Review33Are Children Consuming Too much Digital Technology35Reasons Technology Should be Allowed in the Classroom38-480941-177320ContentsWhy Technology Is Ruining The Next Generation’s Creativity40One in 5 Children Bullied Alone42Dystopian PoetryNot Waving But Drowning – Stevie Smith44There Will Come Soft Rains – Sara Teasdale44The Unknown Citizen – W H Auden45Anyone Loved In A Pretty How Town – E E Cummings46The Second Coming – W B Yeats50The Hollow Men51Dystopia – Aminath Neena55FreedomsMartin Luther King Speech56I am Malala – Prologue6000ContentsWhy Technology Is Ruining The Next Generation’s Creativity40One in 5 Children Bullied Alone42Dystopian PoetryNot Waving But Drowning – Stevie Smith44There Will Come Soft Rains – Sara Teasdale44The Unknown Citizen – W H Auden45Anyone Loved In A Pretty How Town – E E Cummings46The Second Coming – W B Yeats50The Hollow Men51Dystopia – Aminath Neena55FreedomsMartin Luther King Speech56I am Malala – Prologue60War of the Worlds: HG Wells.Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting abruptly into noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax under the window, and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on the rear of this came a couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long procession of flying vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where the North-Western special trains were loading up, instead of coming down the gradient into Euston.For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind him opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed only in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his hair disordered from his pillow."What the devil is it?" he asked. "A fire? What a devil of a row!"They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to hear what the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking."What the devil is it all about?" said my brother's fellow lodger.My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running with each garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early newspapers came bawling into the street:"London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defences forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!"And all about him--in the rooms below, in the houses on each side and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne Park district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn and St. John's Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of London from Ealing to East Ham--people were rubbing their eyes, and opening windows to stare out and ask aimless questions, dressing hastily as the first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It was the dawn of the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours of Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger.Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot and in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. "Black Smoke!" he heard people crying, and again "Black Smoke!" The contagion of such a unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the door-step, he saw another news vender approaching, and got a paper forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran--a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic despatch of the Commander-in-Chief:"The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but in instant flight."That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would be pouring?en masse?northward."Black Smoke!" the voices cried. "Fire!"The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps. And overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm.He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money--some ten pounds altogether--into his pockets, and went out again into the streets. Never Let Me Go, IshiguroThe Day of the Triffids: John WyndhamWhen a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. I felt that from the moment I woke. And yet, when I started functioning a little more smartly, I became doubtful. After all, the odds were that it was I who was wrong, and not everyone else-though I did not see how that could be. I went on waiting, tinged with doubt. But presently I had my first bit of objective evidence-a distant clock stuck what sounded to me just like eight. I listened hard and suspiciously. Soon another clock began, on a hard, decisive note. In a leisurely fashion it gave an indisputable eight. Then I knew things were awry. The way I came to miss the end of the world-well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years-was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it. In the nature of things a good many somebodies are always in hospital, and the law of averages had picked on me to be one of them a week or so before. It might just as easily have been the week before that-in which case I'd not be writing now: I'd not be here at all. But chance played it not only that I should be in hospital at that particular time, but that my eyes, and indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages-and that's why I have to be grateful to whoever orders these averages. At the time, however, I was only peevish, wondering what in thunder went on, for I had been in the place long enough to know that, next to the matron, the clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital. Without a clock the place simply couldn't work. Each second there's someone consulting it on births, deaths, doses, meals, lights, talking, working, sleeping, resting, visiting, dressing, washing-and hitherto it Page 1 had decreed that someone should begin to wash and tidy me up at exactly three minutes after 7 A.M. That was one of the best reasons I had for appreciating a private room. In a public ward the messy proceeding would have taken place a whole unnecessary hour earlier. But here, today, clocks of varying reliability were continuing to strike eight in all directions-and still nobody had shown up. Much as I disliked the sponging process, and useless as it had been to suggest that the help of a guiding hand as far as the bathroom could eliminate it, its failure to occur was highly disconcerting. Besides, it was normally a close forerunner of breakfast, and I was feeling hungry. Probably I would have been aggrieved about it any morning, but today, this Wednesday, May 8, was an occasion of particular personal importance. I was doubly anxious to get all the fuss and routine over because this was the day they were going to take off my bandages. I groped around a bit to find the bell push and let them have a full five seconds' clatter, just to show what I was thinking of them. While I was waiting for the pretty short-tempered response that such a peal ought to bring, I went on listening. The day outside, I realized now, was sounding even more wrong than I had thought. The noises it made, or failed to make, were more like Sunday than Sunday itself-and I'd come round again to being absolutely assured that it was Wednesday, whatever else had happened to it.When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city – which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was. But this city, clustered on the curve of a big blue bay, would come into my mind. I could see the streets, and the buildings that lined them, the waterfront, even boats in the harbour; yet, waking, I had never seen the sea, or a boat . . . And the buildings were quite unlike any I knew. The traffic in the streets was strange, carts running with no horses to pull them; and sometimes there were things in the sky, shiny fish-shaped things that certainly were not birds. Most often I would see this wonderful place by daylight, but occasionally it was by night when the light lay like strings of glow-worms along the shore, and a few of them seemed to be sparks drifting on the water, or in the air. It was a beautiful, fascinating place, and once, when I was still young enough to know no better, I asked my eldest sister, Mary, where this lovely city could be. She shook her head, and told me there was no such place – not now. But, perhaps, she suggested, I could somehow be dreaming about times long ago. Dreams were funny things, and there was no accounting for them; so it might be that what I was seeing was a bit of the world as it had been once upon a time – the wonderful world that the Old People had lived in; as it had been before God sent Tribulation. But after that she went on to warn me very seriously not to mention it to anyone else; other people as far as she knew, did not have such pictures in their heads, either sleeping or waking, so it would be unwise to mention them. That was good advice, and luckily I had the sense to take it. People in our district had a very sharp eye for the odd, the unusual, so that even my left-handedness caused slight disapproval. So, at that time, and for some years afterwards, I did not mention it to anyone – indeed, I almost forgot about it, for as I grew older, the dream came less frequently, and then very rarely. But the advice stuck. Without it I might have mentioned the curious understanding I had with my cousin Rosalind, and that would certainly have led us both into very grave trouble – if anyone had happened to believe me. Neither I nor she, I think, paid much attention to it at that time: we simply had the habit of caution. I certainly did not feel unusual. I was a normal little boy, growing up in a normal way, taking the ways of the world about me for granted. John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (1955)I am Legend – Extract 1ON THOSE CLOUDY DAYS, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he still used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn’t work. That was why he chose to stay near the house on those days.He walked around the house in the dull grey of afternoon, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, trailing threadlike smoke over his shoulder. He checked each window to see if any of the boards had been loosened. After violent attacks, the planks were often split or partially pried off, and he had to replace them completely; a job he hated. Today only one plank was loose. Isn’t that amazing? he thought.In the back yard he checked the hothouse and the water tank. Sometimes the structure around the tank might be weakened or its rain catchers bent or broken off. Sometimes they would lob rocks over the high fence around the hothouse, and occasionally they would tear through the overhead net and he’d have to replace panes.Both the tank and the hothouse were undamaged today. He went to the house for a hammer and nails. As he pushed open the front door, he looked at the distorted reflection of himself in the cracked mirror he’d fastened to the door a month ago. In a few days, jagged pieces of the silver-backed glass would start to fall off. Let ‘em fall, he thought. It was the last damned mirror he’d put there; it wasn’t worth it. He’d put garlic there instead. Garlic always worked.He passed slowly through the dim silence of the living room, turned left into the small hallway, and left again into his bedroom. Once the room had been warmly decorated, but that was in another time. Now it was a room entirely functional, and since Neville’s bed and bureau took up so little space, he had converted one side of the room into a shop.A long bench covered almost an entire wall, on its hardwood top a heavy band saw; a wood lathe, an emery wheel, and a vice. Above it, on the wall, were haphazard racks of the tools that Robert Neville used.He took a hammer from the bench and picked out a few nails from one of the disordered bins. Then he went back outside and nailed the plank fast to the shutter. The unused nails he threw into the rubble next door.For a while he stood on the front lawn looking up and down the silent length of CimarronStreet. He was a tall man, thirty-six, born of English-German stock, his features undistinguished except for the long, determined mouth and the bright blue of his eyes, which moved now over the charred ruins of the houses on each side of his. He’d burned them down to prevent them from jumping on his roof from the adjacent ones.center-33547400This extract is from the opening of a novel by Ray Bradbury. Published in 1953, the novel is set in the future. In this section Guy Montag is a fireman who is in charge of the burning of books.Farenheit 451 It was a pleasure to burn.It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burntcorked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.He hung up his black-beetle-coloured helmet and shined it, he hung his flameproof jacket neatly; he showered luxuriously, and then, whistling, hands in pockets, walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down the hole. At the last moment, when disaster seemed positive, he pulled his hands from his pockets and broke his fall by grasping the golden pole. He slid to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from the concrete floor downstairs.He walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway where the silent, air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air an to the cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb.Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked toward the corner, thinking little at all about nothing in particular. Before he reached the corner, however, he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from nowhere, as if someone had called his name. The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.13462038467700left-55626000An extract from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – a novel set in a post-apocalyptic world, date and place unnamed , though the reader can assume it's somewhere in what was the United States. It begins with a man and boy in the woods.( he believes the boy is given to him by God to take care of) The boy is asleep. The two of them are making their journey along the road. Neither the man nor the boy is given a name; this anonymity adds to the novel's tone that this could be happening anywhere, to anyone.When he woke up in the woods in the dark and cold of the night, he reached out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights are dark beyond darkness and the days, more grey, each one that what had gone before, like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d awaken, he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls, like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stones sleep where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence, the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease, until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black an ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool, stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it; its bowels, its beating heart; the brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.With the first grey light, he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren. Silent. Godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There would be no surviving a winter here.When it was light enough to use the binoculars, he glassed the valley below. Everything was paling away into the murk. The soft ash was blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see: The segments of road down there among the dead trees; looking for anything of colour. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God; God never spoke.right24603000left-154279000leftbottom0016764037317300241935-17145001984 – George OrwellIt was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.?The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.?Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.?Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.?6715067277100033546131686500 1506243725700-68891046653100"August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains" Ray BradburyIn the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk."Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr.Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills."Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…" And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "Who goes there? What's the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.Twelve noon.A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.Two o'clock, sang a voice.Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.Two-fifteen.The dog was gone.In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.Two thirty-five.Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.Four-thirty.The nursery walls glowed.Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films docked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances ofparched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes.It was the children's hour.Five o'clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.Six, seven, eight o'clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.Nine o'clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:"Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?" The house was silent.The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random." Quiet music rose to back the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite…."There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night,And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone."The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.At ten o'clock the house began to die.The wind blew. A failing tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!"Fire!" screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!And then, reinforcements.From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green chemical.The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river....Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…"HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1961)THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen- year-old son, Harrison, away. It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about. On the television screen were ballerinas. A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm. "That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel. "Huh" said George. "That dance-it was nice," said Hazel. "Yup, " said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts . George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas. Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been. "Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer, " said George . "I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up." "Urn, " said George. "Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday- just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion . " "I could think, if it was just chimes," said George. "Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General." "Good as anybody else," said George. "Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel. "Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that. "Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?" It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples. "All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while . " George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me." "You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few." "Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain." "If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around." "If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people ' d get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?" "I'd hate it," said Hazel. "There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?" If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head. "Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel. "What would?" said George blankly. "Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said? "Who knows?" said George. The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen." He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read. "That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard." "Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men. And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive . "Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous." A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall. The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides. Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds . And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random. "If you see this boy, " said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him." There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges. Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake. George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!" The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head. When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen. Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die. "I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook. "Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become ! " Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds. Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor. Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall. He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder. "I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!" A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow. Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask. She was blindingly beautiful. "Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded. The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls." The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs. The music began again and was much improved. Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it. They shifted their weights to their toes. Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers. And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang! Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well. They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun. They leaped like deer on the moon. The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it. And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time . It was then that Diana Moon Clampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor. Diana Moon Clampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on. It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out. Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer. George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel. "Yup, " she said. "What about?" he said. "I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television." "What was it?" he said. "It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel. "Forget sad things," said George. "I always do," said Hazel. "That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head. "Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy, " said Hazel. "You can say that again," said George. "Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy." Dismaland Is a Smug, Cliched Monument to Banksy's Dated AgendaBy?Joe Bish, Photos: Jackson DrowleySeptember 3, 2015From the column?'Britain Is a Weird Place'1186180444500Let's face it; Dismaland is a bad pun. It is, at best, a tweet sent after being disappointed by Space Mountain, a Facebook status bashed out having paid €7 for a soggy hot dog while your infant child screams in horror at weird human Goofy. But ham-fisted puns and visual metaphors have been Banksy's MO ever since he first stencilled a rat onto a flyover. Snogging policemen (yay for gay rights)! A man with a bandana throwing a bouquet of flowers instead of a Molotov (yay for peace)! A robotic arm reaching out of an ATM and attacking a little girl (money is bad)!But Dismaland is more than a stencil, of course; half art show, half funfair, it's geared as a kind of Festival of Britain in reverse, a celebration of national decay set up in a long-abandoned part of Weston-super-Mare. It features a decrepit, burnt out fairytale castle, a riot van fountain with a slide coming out of it and a game in which you attempt to knock an anvil off a plinth with a ping pong ball. In a time of growing political disquiet, when old social divisions are being cleaved open without finesse by the first fully Tory government since 1997, it's not hard to see why demand for tickets and media interest is peaking around Dismaland. But in 2015, is Banksy able to state anything beyond the obvious?You only realise how scattershot Banksy's targets are when you write them down. Walt Disney and the horsemeat scandal. Selfies and the police. Fatcats and bad TV. It's a weird list, a mixture of things your dad would hate jumbled up with the grievances of an anarchist.Talking of bad TV, there used to be a programme on ITV called?Holiday Showdown. In it, two families would experience each others' typical holidays to see how the other half lived. In 2006, they aired an episode in which Family A, who'd routinely jet set to places like Thailand, were forced to endure a numbing stay in Weston-super-Mare – and Family B were treated with absolute derision by all involved for their liking of the English southwest. Almost ten years later, the attitude towards Britain's seaside towns hasn't changed. They're seen as a passé relic of a pre-easyJet era, the crumbled ashes left in the wake of a particularly violent Ryanair take off. Once, though, they were the only option for most people, and one that brought bright-eyed excitement rather than the I-suppose-so sighs they elicit today.1047750952500Weston-super-Mare doesn't have the immediate sense of youthfulness that somewhere like Brighton does. On the contrary, the roads near the entrance to Dismaland were lined with coaches holding dozens and dozens of white-hairs. After disembarking they were, of course, walking in the opposite direction, away from the massive dystopian art prank.There were two queues for entry, one for ticket holders, the other for non-ticket holders. The former was long, but the latter was vast, with people sat on deck chairs awaiting the opportunity to hear, see and soak up Cardinal Banksy's gospel.On the way in there's a fake, cartoonish stop-and-search where aggressive security take the piss and give you a metal detector frisk down "for no reason". Being involved in any kind of am-dram performance is likely to earn a smile, you'd have to have a heart of stone to tut at someone trying to make you laugh. This was no Guantanamo Bay simulator; I wasn't about to be waterboarded with a gallon of flat Fanta. I was asked to place my bag on the floor and pick it back up, before being wished a "miserable day".Then the park opens up and one thing is markedly visible: queues. Queues stretching far and wide. But there were no barriers, no marks on the floor. The people were queuing themselves into contorting snake shapes across the place. I get it: British people love to queue! But having just come from an almost hour-long one, I decided to look around a bit, as the prospect of more waiting in line made me want to crumple to the floor.I went on the merry-go-round, in the middle of which was a figure in a HazMat suit surrounded by boxes of horse lasagne. The staff in purple hi-vis jackets are all uniformly disinterested – a nice joke that went over some people's heads, including one woman who was visibly annoyed when the ferris wheel operator shrugged at her question of, "How many times does it go round?"That said, it was still pretty hard to get away from how basic it was. The horses on the merry-go-round were to be turned into lasagne. Get it? Banksy, I have been getting it since 2013.There were bits about Dismaland that I quite liked. The exhibition, for example, was good, especially Jimmy Cauty's post-riot model village, complete with these miniature policemen stranded in the middle of the sea atop a bully van. But other things, like the cinema, felt jaded and weird rather than incisive. Here were reams of families, grandparents and small children, sat on deck chairs watching a video of a woman's face ageing while gloomy, droning Philip Glass-type music played. Sure, that may be the point of the place: to jar the senses, to take the concept of people relaxing in the sun and juxtapose it with arresting video-art. But without the complicity of the viewers the art looked silly, two things staring at each other in confusion and misapprehension, like your nan watching Boiler Room.The park's soundtrack of Hawaiian steel guitar music was intermittently interrupted by a small child doling out messages like, "If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist." It felt hackneyed and was lost on me, and was the sort of gag a smug sixth former would make while bullies kicked him around the common room floor and rubbed apple cores in his face.The biggest anti-climax of the day was the contents of the dilapidated castle. The biggest queue in the park was reserved for this, snaking, sometimes through other queues, with the queues splicing, people having even less of an idea of what they were waiting for, just standing behind one another on instinct.Inside, there was a green screen against which people had their photo taken, before being ushered into a room that was pitch black save for the flashing lights of the exhibit's "cameras". They illuminated an overturned princess's carriage, flanked by paparazzi, Cinderella flumped out of the window with two cartoon birds doing her dress up. That was it. Was it meant to be Lady Di? I don't know. I guess. I'm not entirely sure I care.For over 20 years, Banksy has been busy anonymously building his cult of personality – but it's that shroud of mystery which has allowed him to be taken and bastardised. Today, Banksy is the anti-capitalist brickwork scribbler, but he's also the parody Twitter account spaffing out positive messages. He's a theorist in a loose sense, but only in a meme-ified form. It's poster art, computer wallpaper art, art to scoff and smirk at. We are constantly told that this invisible graffiti artist is a genius, but what evidence have we got for that besides someone's wall being crowbarred out and sold on for a million pounds every few months? The whole thing screams, "We are intelligent. You – while not?notintelligent – could probably do with reading a few more books. You don't have enough angst, so here's some hidden in a chocolate cake so you don't have to think about it too much." It's not quite poking fun at the philistines and peons trying to enjoy a day out in the sun by the beach, more putting a smug hand on their shoulder and telling them, "Sure, you could ride the waltzer, but how about opening your eyes for once?"There's also something insidious about the idea of making a place purposefully shit and unfulfilling, so that when people come away feeling shit and unfulfilled they can say it's part of the experience.Dismaland feels like a missed opportunity for Banksy and his cohorts. For the last two decades, young people have been getting more and more marginalised as time creeps towards a total annihilation of everything they hold dear – fun, fairness, freedom, prospects; anything resembling a positive future. Yet the man who could be their biggest artistic representative is content hammering the kind of tropes you'd see Nigel Havers incredulously bleating on about during an episode of?Grumpy Old Men. Queuing; being conned by untrustworthy fairground workers; overzealous security checks; celebrity culture; all the drab complaints that prop up the self-righteously glum "Keep Calm" lifestyle. When the Very British Problems Twitter feed already has its own TV show, do we really need Dismaland?What Banksy has created here is a crusty monument to his own dated beefs, which – at a time when British youth have far bigger things to worry about than selfies and ITV2 – manifests more as a parade of delusions than cutting social commentary. His paint-by-numbers anti-capitalist, anti-establishment schtick has become as woefully archaic as the seaside setting of his tawdry monument to humanity's ills.I rode the ferris wheel and looked out onto the beach of Weston-super-Mare. The tide was slowly washing in, like spilled water creeping towards the edge of a table. I saw a line of children sat on donkeys plodding across the wet beach. It was time to leave Dismaland and find a donkey of my own.Everyone on the beach was laughing and running around. A little girl was repeatedly picking up clumps of sand and throwing them angrily into pools of water. If you want your dose of pointless British nihilism then you had to look no further than this scene.I approached the donkey vendor and requested a ride. Only for children, he told me, with a weight limit of seven stone.It appeared I didn't fit in anywhere in Weston-super-Mare, neither in its pretentious unfunfairs, nor on the backs of its heroic donkeys. I wandered on.Banksy, Dismaland, Weston-super-Mare, review: 'gleeful, adolescent despair'IIn the moat around Banksy's castle sits a skewed Little Mermaid?CREDIT:?YUI MOK?Mark Hudson,?art critic?20 AUGUST 2015 ? 7:06PMBanksy, the still-mysterious Bristolian street artist, must be pushing 40, yet the defining tone of his latest show is one of gleeful, establishment-blaming, adolescent despair.It is excellent and I loved it. So many contemporary art exhibitions seem glib in their politics, unimpassioned in their stance, but here Banksy has harnessed his most potent image-making skills to convey a deadly serious message.Recalling the documentary Blackfish, a lifesize killer whale launches itself out of a cistern?CREDIT:?YUI MOKHe’s set up a spoof theme park on Weston Super Mare’s promenade. In the central castle, a dead Cinderellla hangs out of a crashed pumpkin coach, while strobe lights evoke the flashing of paparazzi bulbs. No prizes for guessing which historical event is being alluded to there. At a stroke he deftly links the theme park with his political ideas about the media, showing his ability to sum up an idea in an unforgettable, and grimly hilarious image.Banksy bans lawyers from his Dismaland theme parkAmong other new Banksy works, a near life sized, model killer whale leaps out of a toilet towards a hoop held up by an Allen Jones-style mannequin. Thus he lends the seaside aquarium an element of perverse eroticism.There’s also a pocket money loan stand offering children mortgages on bouncy castles at grossly inflated rates – a taste of what’s to come in life – and instruction on how to break into a bus shelter advertising display and insert your own posters.?Cinderella's carriage lies upturned, the character dangling out of it, unconscious. Meanwhile, a gang of paparazzi look on.?CREDIT:?YUI MOKMaybe it’s the overcast weather but? HYPERLINK "" Dismaland?looks a bit of a tawdry mess. As you first enter, an armoured police van of the sort used in Northern Ireland lies crashed in a pool in front of a trashed approximation of a Walt Disney fairytale castle.With its muddy, un-made-up walkways and ruined surfaces Dismaland gives an impression of cackhanded thrown-togetherness that belies the real money behind it and technical expertise that has brought the whole thing into being, completed just hours before the global media’s arrival.Empty eyed stewards exhort you to "end joy" (enjoy, geddit?) in a none too subtle swipe at Disneyland’s relentless positivism as they point you towards a range of activities from?a Jimmy Savile themed Punch and Judy show?(not operating when I attend) to a tent full of mutant animals.Banksy’s stock has slumped massively since his mid Noughties heyday. It’s hard to maintain a position of beyond the law underground-ness when you’re hailed as a national treasure by the very mainstream media you set out to vilify. You might say the Banksy moment has passed and his trademark stencilled images now appear as fatally emblematic of their era as, say, spacehoppers are of the Seventies.Yet while much here appears to be banging the same old System-baiting drum, there’s enough energy and belief behind the ideas to more than justify a visit.?Dismaland has elements of the theme park, the exhibition and the festival, but it’s best seen as a single total work of art of which Banksy is the author. You may not agree with his anti-capitalist politics but the passion and fundamental seriousness behind this alternative summer holiday destination aren’t in doubtText 1: Are children consuming too much digital technology? The popularity of apps, social networking and gaming among young people could lead to childhood development problems According to the Children's Technology Review, there are more than 40,000 kids' games available on iTunes. Photograph: CulturaAlamy Cultura / Alamy/Alamy How much time should children spend online or playing apps and games?That question is one of the overriding parenting conundrums of our modern digital and social age. It's also a question that has become of particular interest to me as I develop my own app for kids. As I try to create a digital experience children will find so much fun that they'll tell all their friends, I'm aware that I might be contributing to a growing childhood development problem.The facts about children's digital consumption are eye-opening. A 2010 Kaiser Foundation study found that US youths spent more than seven and a half hours a day using media. In another study conducted that year by the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre, which specialises in children's media, two thirds of children aged four to seven had already used an iPhone. And how did these kids get hooked on digital? The Centre's own research suggests that most of the iPhones used by kids had been lent to them by a family member. As a recent Atlantic Monthly article put it: "The centre's researchers labelled this the 'pass-back effect,' a name that captures well the reluctant zone between denying and giving."Are children addicted to digital?A mere 20 years after the Internet was founded, people do not yet know how the explosion in digital connectivity is shaping society. Ever since Gutenberg's breakthrough with the movable press each new breakthrough communication technology – be it the telegraph, the radio, the TV and now the internet – has both been heralded as a benefit and bane for society. Looking back in history the benefits of all these technologies have outweighed the problems they have caused. Could it be that the world is in a new period of technological adaptation and that what is considered digital overload for children, is simply the education they need to prepare for a connected society?Perhaps. But that doesn't mean digital addiction is an issue we can just dismiss. At present there isn't a firm medical consensus on digital addiction. This month, however, the US Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is set to classify Internet Use Disorder (IUD) as an area worthy of further study.Anecdotally, there are plenty of stories detailing how the internet and gaming have ruined peoples lives just like drugs, alcohol and gambling. In South Korea, one of the most digitally advanced nations in the world, government estimates 2.55 million people are addicted to smartphone (using them for more than eight hours a day).While we don't know exactly the effect information overload has on people, we do know that children, especially under-10s, are going to use digital technologies more than any generation before. Consider the apps industry that is only a few years old. According to the Children's Technology Review, an independent publication that monitors kid's interactive media, there are more than 40,000 kids' games available on iTunes, plus thousands more on Google Play. There have been cases of children running up massive bills on their parents' credit cards due to the incremental costs of collecting rewards in some unscrupulous app-based games.How far does a company's responsibility go?Yet even if children aren't being financially manipulated in the games, do gaming and app makers have a corporate and social responsibility to manage the impact their products have? Companies such as Microsoft already include warnings about spending too much time on its Kinect system (though this is geared more at over-exertion) while Nintendo's Super Mario 3D Land employs Princess Peach to advise players to take a break if they are tired (though this is because of concerns about the effect 3D playing has on kid's vision).So could this principle of responsible gaming be expanded to cover digital overload as a whole? Lego is one of the world's biggest toymakers and a leader in digital gaming thanks to savvy partnerships with the Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises. When asked about its social and corporate responsibility to the amount of time children spend playing its games, Lego offered this statement: "Each child and situation is unique and that decision is ultimately the responsibility of the parent, that's why we encourage parents to have a dialogue with their children on healthy digital behavior and – as a family - set some clear rules regarding digital activity."What about education?All of which makes sense. Parents really should take the lead on moderating their kid's digital activity and you can see why technology companies are loathe to self-regulate against a digital affliction that has still yet to be fully understood or defined. But not all kids can count on having parents who care or at this point understand the importance of managing digital health. So what role will the government – or to be more exact, education – need to play in this evolving debate?Primary age schoolkids in the UK already get some lessons in internet safety and protecting their privacy. In South Korea, however, the state education system is ramping up to meet the challenge it has identified in digital obesity. Starting next year, children from ages three to five will be taught to avoid spending too much time on the internet and digital devices.Ultimately though, how kids use digital devices and games will be dictated by the example parents set at home. It's worth considering the next time you download an app to keep the kids quiet.Text 2: 5 Reasons Technology Should Be Allowed in the Classroom Letting students use their devices in class can personalize and improve the educational experience in many ways. by Nicole Antonucci The use of personal technology devices in the classroom is prevalent at colleges and universities. Rather than embracing this trend, some faculty, departments and even entire institutions have started putting limitations on students’ use of personal technology in class.I have experienced this firsthand in multiple classes at my own university. It started with teachers asking students to put away their mobile phones; now instructors are asking us to keep our laptops closed for the duration of class. The reasons behind these limitations typically have been concerns about students’ attention spans: a desire to prevent multitasking, keep them off of social media sites and limit distractions to others.While it is inevitable that students will be distracted at times, putting constraints on the use of personal technology devices will not solve this problem. Restricting use of devices in the classroom is moving away from the trend of improving education by integrating technology. Here are five reasons why educational institutions should continue on that path instead of stepping back.Students are technology natives. Using technology is second nature to students. They have grown up with it and incorporate it into almost every aspect of their lives. Notebooks, tablets and cellphones are all technology that students are accustomed to and can use as ancillary learning aids. They should not lose access to potential learning tools that have known benefits in a classroom.Students use e-books. Many students are purchasing digital editions of textbooks instead of traditional printed copies for a variety of reasons, including cost efficiency, ease of accessibility, and environmental friendliness. E-books are typically accessed through a student’s personal device, such as a notebook, tablet or cellphone. Students should have access to them to look up information during class.Students want streamlined organization. Personal technology devices have a range of features that can aid students with organization, such as note-taking applications, calendars and virtual sticky notes. These help students stay more organized by keeping all of their information centralized and connected between devices. Users can find what works for them and tailor their devices to help them perform more effectively.Students need access to supplemental information. Mobile devices give students Internet access. Although it can be used inappropriately by some (such as to check Facebook or Twitter), students often use the Net to find more information about a topic being discussed in class. Not only can students use their personal devices to find extra data on their own, but professors can provide additional information that is easily accessible to their students.Students can prepare for work in the field. At the higher-education level, many students participate in field work as part of their specific areas of study. Much of this work requires the use of technology. For example, graphic design students may work on real projects that require relevant applications that are accessed through their personal devices. Learning how to use these apps in the classroom allows students will prepare them for using them outside of it.Text 3: Why technology is ruining the next generation’s creativityBy Macy Salama The fiery red and orange lava bubbles rose up. I jumped from stone to stone, knowing, that if I slipped, the lava would burn me. My life was on the line. Actually, instead of lava, it was my living room floor, and the stones were pillows. When I was a kid, this was my imagination.Now kids don’t have to imagine the lava, they can see it. They touch a screen to jump from stone to stone. Their imaginations are restricted as they immerse themselves in technology. They don’t need an imagination to play a game.Imagination is the ability to form mental images using all five senses. Everybody has this ability; but some have more highly developed imaginations than others. It makes anything we can think of possible, which gives us the ability to look at situations from different perspectives.When I babysit, I ask the kids if they want to go outside. I often get a similar response of moaning and groaning, begging me to let them stay inside to play their video games. This worries me.When I was younger, my mind was my entertainment. I’d step outside, and I would suddenly be in a jungle. The mud was quicksand and it was better than any video game or TV series. Though I still watched movies, or played Nintendo 64, I never relied on technology as my main source of entertainment.Webster University philosophy professor, Michael Brady, said he is not anti-technology, but he thinks technology can limit possibilities.Brady has two children, Abigail and Victoria, who are both in their early 20s. Brady said when his children were younger he noticed that their friends sat in front of the TV for hours and rarely played outside. He built his girls a tree house which became their main source of entertainment. He wanted his girls to have a place where only their imaginations could determine their possibilities. Brady describes his girls as extremely strong, and says they aren’t afraid to take charge of a situation. He believes playing outside helped develop their sense of imagination. As a result, he finds them to be comfortable in dominant roles.Why are activities that require imagination, like playing outside, not a main source of entertainment for kids anymore? Do they know how to use their imaginations? Maybe children stopped “seeing the lava,” and I don’t blame them.From the time kids today are born, everything they have is virtual, 3D and right in front of them. The games they play today are already designed for them. They don’t need imagination. Before we know it, we’ll be giving books to kids, and they’ll be confused when they touch the page and nothing moves.“Imagination has to do with possibilities,” Brady said.Growing up, my imagination taught me how to be comfortable by myself. I was always entertained, which meant I didn’t need a phone to keep me from being bored. I had endless opportunities when it came to what I could do and think about.What will happen without imagination? Will kids be okay by themselves? These days, children are born into a time where they can pull out their phones to talk to someone every time they get lonely or need entertainment. They don’t rely on their own minds. So what do we do about this? We change it.We have the power to influence younger generations. It is not realistic to get rid of technology. But let’s make sure kids know how to think without it. Kids need to learn to be okay, by themselves without phones, computers or videogames. Let’s remind them to rely on themselves for happiness, rather than the game in front of them. Let’s tell them stories, and have them draw the illustrations themselves. Let’s make sure kids know how to exercise the incredible gift of imagination. Let’s remind kids they have the ability to make the unreal, real — using only their minds. Text 4: One in five children bullied online, says NSPCC survey-889062547500Children most commonly experienced bullying and trolling while online, the survey suggested Almost one in five children who use social networking sites suffered a negative experience last year, research by children's charity the NSPCC shows.This included bullying, unwanted sexual messages, cyber stalking and feeling pressure to look a certain way.The NSPCC also said a "large number" of users of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were under the minimum age of 13. A full report of the survey of 1,024 11 to 16-year-olds from across the UK will be published in November. The survey also showed that the most common bad experiences among children were bullying and trolling.This involves insulting or intimidating others, usually under a pseudonym, to provoke a reaction. 'Feeling isolated' The NSPCC said the survey was commissioned because of increased concern around what children and young people were being exposed to on the internet.Earlier this month, 14-year-old Hannah Smith, from Leicestershire, was found hanged. Her father said she had been sent abusive messages on social networking site, ask.fm.Claire Lilley, NSPCC safer technology expert, said: "It's unbearable to think any young person should feel there is no other option but to end their life because of bullying on social networking sites." She said their research revealed a "worrying landscape" and the charity's forthcoming report would focus on the issues of "trolling" and cyber-bullying and the impact they have on young children, in particular 11 and 12-year-olds.She said there was "a bit of a blind spot" in the way social networking sites were dealing with underage children."This is something that must be tackled before it gets out of hand," she said."We must ensure young people have the confidence to speak out against this abuse, so that they don't feel isolated and without anywhere to turn."Last week, Prime Minister David Cameron called on people to boycott websites that fail to tackle online abuse.Following the death of Hannah Smith, Latvia-based ask.fm ordered a law firm to carry out a "full and independent audit" of the site and its safety features.The site had 13.2 million daily visitors worldwide in June. Members can ask each other questions and then get replies, which include text, photos and videos - via its website or apps. One of its most controversial features is the ability for members to pose questions to others anonymously. Not Waving but DrowningBY?STEVIE SMITH?????????????????Nobody heard him, the dead man,???But still he lay moaning:I was much further out than you thought???And not waving but drowning.Poor chap, he always loved?larkingAnd now he’s deadIt must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,???They said.Oh, no no no, it was too cold always???(Still the dead one lay moaning)???I was much too far out all my life???And not waving but drowning.There will come soft rains?(1920)Sara TeasdaleThere will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;And frogs in the pools singing at night,And wild-plum trees in?tremulous?white;Robins will wear their feathery fire,Whistling their?whims?on a low fence-wire;And not one will know of the war, not oneWill care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,If mankind?perished?utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawnWould scarcely know that we were gone.The Unknown CitizenW. H. Auden,?1907?-?1973(To JS/07 M 378This Marble MonumentIs Erected by the State)He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to beOne against whom there was no official complaint,And all the reports on his conduct agreeThat, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.Except for the War till the day he retiredHe worked in a factory and never got fired,But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,For his Union reports that he paid his dues,(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)And our Social Psychology workers foundThat he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every dayAnd that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declareHe was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment PlanAnd had everything necessary to the Modern Man,A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.He was married and added five children to the population,Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.anyone lived in a pretty how townE. E. Cummings,?1894?-?1962anyone lived in a pretty how town(with up so floating many bells down)spring summer autumn winterhe sang his didn’t he danced his did.Women and men(both little and small)cared for anyone not at allthey sowed their isn’t they reaped their samesun moon stars rainchildren guessed(but only a fewand down they forgot as up they grewautumn winter spring summer)that noone loved him more by morewhen by now and tree by leafshe laughed his joy she cried his griefbird by snow and stir by stillanyone’s any was all to hersomeones married their everyoneslaughed their cryings and did their dance(sleep wake hope and then)theysaid their nevers they slept their dreamstars rain sun moon(and only the snow can begin to explainhow children are apt to forget to rememberwith up so floating many bells down)one day anyone died i guess(and noone stooped to kiss his face)busy folk buried them side by sidelittle by little and was by wasall by all and deep by deepand more by more they dream their sleepnoone and anyone earth by aprilwish by spirit and if by yes.Women and men(both dong and ding)summer autumn winter springreaped their sowing and went their camesun moon stars rainThe Second ComingBY?WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS?????????????????Turning and turning in the widening gyre???The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere???The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst???Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.???The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out???When a vast image out of?Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert???A shape with lion body and the head of a man,???A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,???Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it???Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.???The darkness drops again; but now I know???That twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,???And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,???Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?The Hollow MenMistah Kurtz-he dead? ? ? ? ? ? A penny for the Old Guy? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?I? ? We are the hollow men? ? We are the stuffed men? ? Leaning together? ? Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!? ? Our dried voices, when? ? We whisper together? ? Are quiet and meaningless? ? As wind in dry grass? ? Or rats' feet over broken glass? ? In our dry cellar? ??? ? Shape without form, shade without colour,? ? Paralysed force, gesture without motion;? ??? ? Those who have crossed? ? With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom? ? Remember us-if at all-not as lost? ? Violent souls, but only? ? As the hollow men? ? The stuffed men.? ??? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ??II? ? Eyes I dare not meet in dreams? ? In death's dream kingdom? ? These do not appear:? ? There, the eyes are? ? Sunlight on a broken column? ? There, is a tree swinging? ? And voices are? ? In the wind's singing? ? More distant and more solemn? ? Than a fading star.? ??? ? Let me be no nearer? ? In death's dream kingdom? ? Let me also wear? ? Such deliberate disguises? ? Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves? ? In a field? ? Behaving as the wind behaves? ? No nearer-? ??? ? Not that final meeting? ? In the twilight kingdom? ??? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?III? ? This is the dead land? ? This is cactus land? ? Here the stone images? ? Are raised, here they receive? ? The supplication of a dead man's hand? ? Under the twinkle of a fading star.? ??? ? Is it like this? ? In death's other kingdom? ? Waking alone? ? At the hour when we are? ? Trembling with tenderness? ? Lips that would kiss? ? Form prayers to broken stone.? ??? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?IV? ? The eyes are not here? ? There are no eyes here? ? In this valley of dying stars? ? In this hollow valley? ? This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms? ??? ? In this last of meeting places? ? We grope together? ? And avoid speech? ? Gathered on this beach of the tumid river? ??? ? Sightless, unless? ? The eyes reappear? ? As the perpetual star? ? Multifoliate rose? ? Of death's twilight kingdom? ? The hope only? ? Of empty men.? ??? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?V? ??Here we go round the prickly pear? ? Prickly pear prickly pear? ? Here we go round the prickly pear? ? At five o'clock in the morning.? ??? ? Between the idea? ? And the reality? ? Between the motion? ? And the act? ? Falls the Shadow? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?For Thine is the Kingdom? ??? ? Between the conception? ? And the creation? ? Between the emotion? ? And the response? ? Falls the Shadow? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Life is very long? ??? ? Between the desire? ? And the spasm? ? Between the potency? ? And the existence? ? Between the essence? ? And the descent? ? Falls the Shadow? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?For Thine is the Kingdom? ??? ? For Thine is? ? Life is? ? For Thine is the? ??? ??This is the way the world ends? ? This is the way the world ends? ? This is the way the world ends? ? Not with a bang but a whimper.Dystopia – Aminath NeenaI took a journey onceto the land of the learned dunce?Upon a blood -red skyalong which grief stood by?Where east and west met?across nautical boundaries setAmidst a chest of cocaine truffleBehind a steamy cauldron shuffleShaded by ancient druidsDeceived by sherbet fluidsBeyond chambers muffled with sounds?Of falsehood mimed among cahootsBehind the altar of the puppet fleetThere, crushed as petals under feet,?Were the smiles of innocenceStamped on each- a badge of impotenceWhere a mass of intestines pipedForming the ghettos blatantly hypedWhere walls of despair stretched?Across pools of blood drenchedWhilst woven tales fathomedAmong deaf tongues interlockedBehind the altar of the puppet fleetThere, crushed as petals under feet,?Were the echoes of smiling innocenceStamped on each- a badge of impotenceWhere the bridge of humanitylay tattered in garments of atrocityThere the gleaming silver of bladesFlashed upon trespassing clansAnd when the boisterous shadows?Of their wolf pack herd narrowsFalling across fears of my pastI wake up with tears in my heartdiagnosed with a dose of myopiaOn the road straight-to Dystopia.?Martin Luther King speech – 28th August 1963I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.Five score years ago,?a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the?Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the?Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.We cannot walk alone.And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.We cannot turn back.There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.*We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only."*?We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."?I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.I have a?dream?today!I have a dream that one day,?down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.I have a?dream?today!I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."2This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,From every mountainside, let freedom ring!?And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.?But not only that:Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.From every mountainside, let freedom ring.?And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when?all?of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:????????????????Free at last! Free at last!??????????????? Thank?God?Almighty, we are free at last!3I am Malala - Prologue: The Day my World Changed I come from a country which was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday. One year ago I left my home for school and never returned. I was shot by a Taliban bullet and was flown out of Pakistan unconscious. Some people say I will never return home but I believe firmly in my heart that I will. To be torn from the country that you love is not something to wish on anyone. Now, every morning when I open my eyes, I long to see my old room full of my things, my clothes all over the floor and my school prizes on the shelves.?Instead I am in a country which is five hours behind my beloved?homeland Pakistan and my home in the Swat Valley. But my country is centuries behind this one. Here there is any convenience you can imagine. Water running from every tap, hot or cold as you wish; lights at the flick of a switch, day and night, no need for oil lamps; ovens to cook on that don’t need anyone to go and fetch gas cylinders from the bazaar. Here everything is so modern one can even find food ready cooked in packets. When I stand in front of my window and look out, I see tall buildings, long roads full of vehicles moving in orderly lines, neat green hedges and lawns, and tidy pavements to walk on. I close my eyes and for a moment I am back in my valley – the high snow-topped mountains, green waving fields and?fresh blue rivers – and my heart smiles when it looks at the people of Swat. My mind transports me back to my school and there I am reunited with my friends and teachers. I meet my best friend Moniba and we sit together, talking and joking as if I had never left. Then I remember I am in Birmingham, England. The day when everything changed was Tuesday, 9 October 2012. It wasn’t the best of days to start with as it was the middle of school exams, though as a bookish girl I didn’t mind them as much as some of my classmates. That morning we arrived in the narrow mud lane off Haji Baba Road in our usual procession of brightly painted rickshaws, sputtering diesel fumes, each one crammed with five or six girls. Since the time of the Taliban our school has had no sign and the ornamented brass door in a white wall across from the woodcutter’s yard gives no hint of what lies beyond. For us girls that doorway was like a magical entrance to our own special world. As we skipped through, we cast off our headscarves like winds puffing away clouds to make way for the sun then ran helter-skelter up the steps. At the top of the steps was an open courtyard with doors to all the classrooms. We dumped our backpacks in our rooms then gathered for morning assembly under the sky, our backs to the mountains as we stood to attention. One girl commanded, ‘Assaan bash! ’ or ‘Stand at ease!’ and we clicked our heels and responded, ‘Allah.’ Then she said, ‘Hoo she yar!’ or ‘Attention!’ and we clicked our heels again. ‘Allah.’ The school was founded by my father before I was born, and on the wall above us khushal school was painted proudly in red and white letters. We went to school six mornings a week and as a fifteen-year-old in Year 9 my classes were spent chanting chemical equations or studying Urdu grammar; writing stories in English with morals like ‘Haste makes waste’ or drawing diagrams of blood circulation – most of my classmates wanted to be doctors. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would see that as a threat. Yet, outside the door to the school lay not only the noise and craziness of Mingora, the main city of Swat, but also those like the Taliban who think girls should not go to school. That morning had begun like any other, though a little later than usual. It was exam time so school started at nine instead of eight, which was good as I don’t like getting up and can sleep through the crows of the cocks and the prayer calls of the muezzin. First my father would try to rouse me. ‘Time to get up, Jani mun,’ he would say. This means ‘soulmate’ in Persian, and he always called me that at the start of the day. ‘A few more minutes, Aba, please,’ I’d beg, then burrow deeper under the quilt. Then my mother would come. ‘Pisho,’ she would call. This means ‘cat’ and is her name for me. At this point I’d realise the time and shout, ‘Bhabi, I’m late!’ In our culture, every man is your ‘brother’ and every woman your ‘sister’. That’s how we think of each other. When my father first brought his wife to school, all the teachers referred to her as ‘my brother’s wife’ or Bhabi. That’s how it stayed from then on. We all call her Bhabi now. I slept in the long room at the front of our house, and the only furniture was a bed and a cabinet which I had bought with some of the money I had been given as an award for campaigning for peace in our valley and the right for girls to go to school. On some shelves were all the gold-coloured plastic cups and trophies I had won for coming first in my class. Only twice had I not come top – both times when I was beaten by my class rival Malka e-Noor. I was determined it would not happen again. The school was not far from my home and I used to walk, but since the start of last year I had been going with other girls in a rickshaw and coming home by bus. It was a journey of just five minutes along the stinky stream, past the giant billboard for Dr Humayun’s Hair Transplant Institute where we joked that one of our bald male teachers must have gone when he suddenly started to sprout hair. I liked the bus because I didn’t get as sweaty as when I walked, and I could chat with my friends and gossip with Usman Ali, the driver, who we called Bhai Jan, or ‘Brother’. He made us all laugh with his crazy stories. I had started taking the bus because my mother was scared of me walking on my own. We had been getting threats all year. Some were in the newspapers, some were notes or messages passed on by people. My mother was worried about me, but the Taliban had never come for a girl and I was more concerned they would target my father as he was always speaking out against them. His close friend and fellow campaigner Zahid Khan had been shot in the face in August on his way to prayers and I knew everyone was telling my father, ‘Take care, you’ll be next.’ Our street could not be reached by car, so coming home I would get off the bus on the road below by the stream and go through a barred iron gate and up a flight of steps. I thought if anyone attacked me it would be on those steps. Like my father I’ve always been a daydreamer, and sometimes in lessons my mind would drift and I’d imagine that on the way home a terrorist might jump out and shoot me on those steps. I wondered what I would do. Maybe I’d take off my shoes and hit him, but then I’d think if I did that there would be no difference between me and a terrorist. It would be better to plead, ‘OK, shoot me, but first listen to me. What you are doing is wrong. I’m not against you personally, I just want every girl to go to school.’ I wasn’t scared but I had started making sure the gate was locked at night and asking God what happens when you die. I told my best friend Moniba everything. We’d lived on the same street when we were little and been friends since primary school and we shared everything, Justin Bieber songs and Twilight movies, the best face-lightening creams. Her dream was to be a fashion designer although she knew her family would never agree to it, so she told everyone she wanted to be a doctor. It’s hard for girls in our society to be anything other than teachers or doctors if they can work at all. I was different – I never hid my desire when I changed from wanting to be a doctor to wanting to be an inventor or a politician. Moniba always knew if something was wrong. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘The Taliban have never come for a small girl.’ When our bus was called, we ran down the steps. The other girls all covered their heads before emerging from the door and climbing up into the back. The bus was actually what we call a dyna, a white Toyota TownAce truck with three parallel benches, one along either side and one in the middle. It was cramped with twenty girls and three teachers. I was sitting on the left between Moniba and a girl from the year below called Shazia Ramzan, holding our exam folders to our chests and our school bags under our feet. After that it is all a bit hazy. I remember that inside the dyna it was hot and sticky. The cooler days were late coming and only the faraway mountains of the Hindu Kush had a frosting of snow. The back where we sat had no windows, just thick plastic sheeting at the sides which flapped and was too yellowed and dusty to see through. All we could see was a little stamp of open sky out of the back and glimpses of the sun, at that time of day a yellow orb floating in the dust that streamed over everything. I remember that the bus turned right off the main road at the army checkpoint as always and rounded the corner past the deserted cricket ground. I don’t remember any more. In my dreams about the shooting my father is also in the bus and he is shot with me, and then there are men everywhere and I am searching for my father. In reality what happened was we suddenly stopped. On our left was the tomb of Sher Mohammad Khan, the finance minister of the first ruler of Swat, all overgrown with grass, and on our right the snack factory. We must have been less than 200 metres from the checkpoint. We couldn’t see in front, but a young bearded man in lightcoloured clothes had stepped into the road and waved the van down. ‘Is this the Khushal School bus?’ he asked our driver. Usman Bhai Jan thought this was a stupid question as the name was painted on the side. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I need information about some children,’ said the man. ‘You should go to the office,’ said Usman Bhai Jan. As he was speaking another young man in white approached the back of the van. ‘Look, it’s one of those journalists coming to ask for an interview,’ said Moniba. Since I’d started speaking at events with my father to campaign for girls’ education and against those like the Taliban who want to hide us away, journalists often came, even foreigners, though not like this in the road. The man was wearing a peaked cap and had a handkerchief over his nose and mouth as if he had flu. He looked like a college student. Then he swung himself onto the tailboard at the back and leaned in right over us. ‘Who is Malala?’ he demanded. No one said anything, but several of the girls looked at me. I was the only girl with my face not covered. That’s when he lifted up a black pistol. I later learned it was a Colt 45. Some of the girls screamed. Moniba tells me I squeezed her hand. My friends say he fired three shots, one after another. The first went through my left eye socket and out under my left shoulder. I slumped forward onto Moniba, blood coming from my left ear, so the other two bullets hit the girls next to me. One bullet went into Shazia’s left hand. The third went through her left shoulder and into the upper right arm of Kainat Riaz. My friends later told me the gunman’s hand was shaking as he fired. By the time we got to the hospital my long hair and Moniba’s lap were full of blood. Who is Malala? I am Malala and this is my story ................
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