Freedom полностью

Sitting alone in RISEN’s frigid one-room office in Alexandria, Joey wrote Kenny’s jumbled faxings out of Baghdad into persuasive reports on the judicious use of taxpayer dollars to remake Saddam-subsidized bakers as CPA-backed entrepreneurs. He used his case studies of the Breadmasters and Hot & Crusty chains, written the previous summer, to create a handsome business-plan template for these would-be entrepreneurs to follow. He developed a two-year plan for jacking bread prices up into the vicinity of fair market, with the basic Iraqi khubz as a loss-leader and overpriced pastries and attractively marketed coffee drinks as the moneymakers, so that, by 2005, Coalition subsidies could be phased out without sparking bread riots. Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit. He had not the foggiest notion of what a Basra storefront looked like; he suspected, for example, that plate-glass Breadmasters-style refrigerated pastry display windows might not fare well in a city of car bombings and 130-degree summer heat. But the bullshit of modern commerce was a language he’d been happy to find himself fluent in, and Kenny assured him that all that mattered was the appearance of tremendous activity and instantaneous results. “Make it look good yesterday,” Kenny said, “and then we’ll do our best here on the ground to catch up with how it looks. Jerry wants free markets overnight, and that’s what we gotta give him.” (“Jerry” was Paul Bremer, head honcho in Baghdad, whom Kenny may or may not have even met.) In Joey’s idle hours at the office, especially on weekends, he chatted with school friends who were working unpaid internships or flipping burgers in their hometowns and showered him with envy and congratulations for having landed the most awesome summer job ever. He felt as if the progress of his life, which 9/11 had knocked off course, had now fully regained its sensational upward trajectory.

For a while, the only shadows on his satisfaction were Jenna’s postponements of her trip to Washington. A recurrent theme of their conversations was her worry that she’d sown insufficient wild oats before committing herself to Nick. (“I’m not sure that having been a slut for a year at Duke really counts,” she said.) Joey could hear in her worry the whispering of opportunity, and he was confounded when, despite the increasingly raw flirtation of their phone calls, she twice canceled plans to come down and see him, and even more confounded when he learned from Jonathan that she’d been to her parents’ in McLean without letting him know.

Then, on the Fourth of July, during a family visit he was making only to be nice, he vouchsafed to his father the details of his work at RISEN, hoping to impress him with the size of his salary and the scope of his responsibilities; and his father all but disowned him on the spot. Until now, all his life, their relationship had essentially been a standoff, a stalemate of wills. But now his dad was no longer content to send him on his way with a lecture about his coldness and his arrogance. Now he was shouting that Joey made him sick, that it physically disgusted him to have raised a son so selfish and unthinking that he was willing to connive with monsters trashing the country for their personal enrichment. His mother, instead of defending him, ran for her life: upstairs, to her little room. He knew she would be calling him the next morning, trying to smooth things over, feeding him crap about how his dad was only angry because he loved him. But she was too cowardly to stick around, and there was nothing he could do himself but cross his arms tightly and make his face a mask and shake his head and tell his dad, over and over, not to criticize things he didn’t understand.

“What’s not to understand?” his father said. “This is a war for politics and profit. Period!”

“Just because you don’t like people’s politics,” Joey said, “it doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong. You’re pretending that everything they do is bad, you’re hoping they’re going to fail at everything, because you hate their politics. You don’t even want to hear about the good things that are happening.”

“There are no good things happening.”

“Oh, right. It’s a black-and-white world. We’re all bad and you’re all good.”

“You think the way the world works is that Middle Eastern kids the same age as you are getting their heads and their legs blown off so you can make a ton of money? That’s the perfect world you live in?”

“Obviously not, Dad. Would you stop being stupid for a second? People are getting killed over there because their economy is fucked up. We’re trying to fix their economy, OK?”