Word: alec
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...wrench is thrown into the works when brother Alec pays a visit from Columbia school of journalism. Full of righteous indignation at his family's assimilation, he tells them to shape up or ship out. Astonishingly enough, the United States government has just made Harry an offer to rat out Alec's African National Congress friends in exchange for a cushy job in the Netherlands. Harry has a dilemma: he knows South Africa is tearing his family apart, but his only way out is to abuse Alec's trust...
...condone an oppressive regime by caving in to its social institutions or perform a shady act of obedience to a country that sympathizes with the regime. The family is never given a chance to reach a compromise, say by firing their servants or transplanting themselves to an embassy. After Alec arrives, it's downhill into death and destruction for the Burgess family. But, after careful analysis, it's a tragedy that by rights shouldn't happen...
Harry suffers for his decision while the other family members are vindicated in the end. It's not at all clear why that should be the outcome. Alec's solution to apartheid was to refuse the help of the servants around the house and eventually fire them all: hardly a way to lift them out of dire poverty. And he doesn't understand that many factors come into play, like different tribes of Africans not being able to put up a united front. Mother Patrice is obsessed with "reasonable" treatment of native Africans. This consists in papering over deep-seated...
...forces. Ironically enough, Harry wants to take the family to visit Gandhi's house, and he pays the servants more than the British neighbors do. Patrice is a liberal who knows about Che Guevara, even if she brings the name up only to spit it right back at idealistic Alec. Patrice had ideals, but they have precipitated into a wickedly sardonic sense of humor-for example, "What does a woman interested in American art do when they stop making the stuff?" The Burgesses wouldn't be torn about their contribution to apartheid if they werent deeply concerned about...
...Enjoying the attention a little too much, I realized I needed to leave. As I left I was stopped by Mikey Halliday, who was wearing a Hillary Clinton sweatshirt and begged me to vote for the Democrats. I informed him that if Bush won, Alec Baldwin said he would move to France, which was tempting. Mikey is Australian and couldn't vote, which was what made him so desperate to convince me. "If Bush gets in, there's no way I'm going to become a citizen," he said. I figured Mikey had crossed Bush in some '70s coke deal...