Page 7 - Asheville NC Revised2

“You know, you may be right,” I finally said. “A woman’s face can launch a thousand cruise missiles.”
“See,” she said, yawning a bit and looking wistfully out the window at AU’s restful quadrangle.
To tell the truth I’d already done some preliminary investigation and found her to be a thirty-something still pursuing her undergraduate degree while working for the school. “You’re Grace I presume?”
“And your Dan I know.”
“Probably glad to meet you. What’s your major?” I asked, hoping it would be Lit. or even better, Poly Sci.
“Management. I find I’m less likely to fall in love with the professor in that quadrant of academia.”
“Ah yessss,” I said. Damn I thought. A pure Christian capitalist. Not much hope for an extended serial monogamy there. “Sharing, not managing, is the hope of humanity,” I said. “The opiate, cocaine, and LSD of humanity is the contradictory concept of capitalistic Christianity. One quintessentially embodied by Billy Graham I might add.”
As usual I was laying all my philosophical cards on the table due to an impulse control problem, as well as in order to let her know what’s what. And hopefully discover if there was a mental component of this beauty worth exploiting.
“You’re mistaken,” she said, fingering a golden cross neckless lying on her white throat. “American Christianity and capitalism have combined to create the greatest happiness on Earth.”
“Not quite. The Golden Rule is buried under rationalizations like welfare lazies and maximized profit. Happiness is often sacrificed to endless consumption and frenzied production.”
“We’ve simply found a scientific way to harness selfishness for sharing,” Grace countered. She used her pinkie to rotate a swath of hair behind her ear so that some caught enough light to sheen dark scarlet. “You aren’t so far of the socialist deep end that you don’t believe in private property do you?”
“You can’t trivialize me that easily,” I said, then swallowed a thrill inspired by her scarlet sheen. “Private property is sacred. American capitalism is genius. We just need to insure that individual ambition doesn’t destroy community necessities and the ecology.”
“So you’re a semantic juggler,” she said. “You can defy the powers that be all you like. We’ll just have to find if you’ve carefully culled the classics and have discovered a well-founded argument against the way of things. Or maybe you’re just a knee-jerk rebel against everything.”