Alison Burke had never had a moment of doubt about the rightness and correctness of her vision. From the simplest sparrow fallen from the oak tree in her back yard, to the poor Polish immigrants who worked the lathes at Stanley & Corbin, to the strays, misfits, emotionally distraught, and socially foundering, Alison had unquestioned compassion. God had created an imperfect world and knighted human beings to make it a better place.
Some children are like that, concluded her father, one of New Brighton's most important industrialists, a New Hampshire conservative with impressive credentials - his forbear Hiram Burke had led the Third New Hampshire Brigade against the British at Keene, and every descendant carried on the tradition of patriotism, honor, courage, and ambition.
Which is why Lending Burke wondered where his daughter's fairy tale compassion came from. Yes, she had read Jesus' parables, took the Beatitudes to heart, and felt a deep commiseration for his suffering; but all this should have been offset by the flinty rectitude of the Burkes.
How could his daughter not have incorporated the essentialities of history - that perennial ambition for wealth, influence, and recognition? It was that ambition that was the engine of the new Republic for which his ancestors had fought. It was the fuel that powered America's great industrial revolution, and enabled its international economic and financial preeminence.
As he looked out the bay window overlooking the rose gardens, arbors, and trellises designed with the Palace of Versailles in mind, elegant, intricate patterns that were both limns to nature and man's ingenuity, he saw his daughter gently carrying a baby starling to the birdbath to give it water, caressing it in the palm of her hand and whispering to it.
As she grew older, this childlike innocence became hardened into political commitment. She joined the picket lines in front of his factory, demanding workers rights. She befriended the homeless, joined Black Lives Matter, and stood before the walls of the Pentagon protesting for peace.
This sweet young thing, this flaxen-haired, blue-eyed beauty had turned into a flannel-and-jackbooted dyke, a tough girl, a cunt right before his eyes. No matter how much he persuaded, cajoled, pleaded, and bribed, she was adamant, defiant, and wild-eyed with reformist passion.
Old Lending was nonplussed and incredulous. Everything about her upbringing should have led her to the same patriotic sensibilities that had inspired generations of Burkes. She had attended the the right schools, had been a debutante, danced at Christmas cotillions, and was the pride and joy of New Brighton society.
Then this demonic, perverse change came about. The young woman had gone from innocent, American prize, to foul mouthed bitch overnight. It was as though this blind childish compassion had all the while been morphing and evolving until it gurgled and bubbled up and out. Lending had always been on the side of Nature, the ineluctable influence of one's genetic structure inextricably linked with the greater reality of human nature - innately self-interested, aggressive, and ceaselessly territorial. A Darwinian jumble, he reasoned, out of his control.
He overstated the case, however, for Nurture cannot be discounted in the formation of one's character, and there must have been one heady moment - or in his daughter's case some tough girl from Bernal Heights who turned her head, who manipulated this instinctively innocent and compassionate girl into a firebrand for progressive causes.
That's what did it for sure, Lending considered, in bed with an emotional dominatrix who turned every orgasm into an explosive political statement.
When his daughter brought Johnny home to meet the parents, Lending and his wife were not sure how to receive her. Some rough-and-tumble horseplay in the rec room? Boilermakers and oyster shooters at the bar? Ribs and lobster on the barbie? They had never had a lesbian in the house before, let alone a truck driving, big-rig operator from the Coast.
Johnny sneered at the patrician opulence of the Burkes' home, snickered at the propriety and cultivated manners of her host, mansplained with legs wide apart on the divan, talked Marx, Engels, and Rap Brown, and was an absolute boor.
Which might have been the turning point for Alison; for it was one thing to be butch-and-leather on Folsom Street, but not here in the West End of New Brighton. The contrast was too shocking, and the good nature and good will of her parents despite the immaturity and insolence of her lover was a recall to her former life. Where had she been?
It would do an injustice to the young Alison to assume such a whipsaw conversion one way and then another. These things, despite what seems to the outsider to be abrupt and incomprehensible, are gradual progressions of value. There was something about high intelligence which enables swings of fortune but which never permits a head-over-heels fall for them.
In these exploratory swings logic and perusal are never completely absent; and so it was at one defining moment on the Columbia campus amidst a thousand shouting pro-Hamas, Jew-hating students, that Alison began to regain her footing. How had she been so easily dragooned? Shanghaied in a barnyard of squealing and grunting pigs banging their way to the trough? Coopted, promised a legacy, then ended up in a cattle roundup with one quick bolt to the brain?
It only takes one of these events to make an intelligent person U-turn and head home; and one by one the febrile intentions of the campus Left fell by the wayside - the gender spectrum, the Communist Internationale, the political blinders, and the faux compassionate idolatry. And what was she doing with Johnny, this sour-smelling, sexual misfit?
'The bitch set me up', DC Mayor for Life Marion Barry had said about the sting operation that caught him smoking crack with an Anacostia whore. The meaning of that marvelously indignant response to the FBI agents who burst in on him now became clear. She had been set up as baldly and imposingly as Barry, but never knew it until it was almost too late. Thank God for the Columbia campus anti-Jew revelry, an epiphanic moment and none too soon. The difference was in her complicity - her ignorant idealism despite the patriotic realism of her family.
Alison returned to the fold, embraced her family, and became a leading conservative - an intellectual conservative a la William F Buckley and Milton Friedman, an apostle of Hayek and Adam Smith, a foundational thinker, all of which would never have been possible without her innocence, her willful defiance, her intelligence, and her clear, unequivocal vision.
'Where have I been?', she asked her father, giving him a warm embrace and a kiss, nodding to the portrait of great great grandfather Hiram Burke and his wife Abigail, and sitting back in the marvelously comfortable Townsend chair below it.
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