Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“You sleep all right?” Walter said.

“Slept fine. Where’s Patty?”

Walter shrugged. “She’s not coming to the meeting, if that’s what you mean.”

“We’re actually trying to accomplish something,” Lalitha said. “We’re not trying to spend the entire day laughing at how impossible it is to accomplish anything.”

Whuff!

Jessica’s eyes were darting from person to person, spectating. Walter, on closer inspection, had terrible circles under his eyes, and his fingers, on the tabletop, were doing something between trembling and tapping. Lalitha looked a bit wrecked herself, her face bluish with dark-skinned pallor. Observing the relation of their bodies to each other, their deliberate angling-apart, Katz wondered if chemistry might already have done its work. They looked sullen and guilty, like lovers compelled to behave themselves in public. Or, conversely, like people who hadn’t settled on terms yet and were unhappy with each other. The situation merited careful monitoring either way.

“So we’ll start with the problem,” Walter said. “The problem is that nobody dares make overpopulation part of the national conversation. And why not? Because the subject is a downer. Because it seems like old news. Because, like with global warming, we haven’t quite reached the point where the consequences become undeniable. And because we sound like elitists if we try to tell poor people and uneducated people not to have so many babies. Having large families tracks inversely with economic status, and so does the age at which girls start having babies, which is just as damaging from a numbers perspective. You can cut the growth rate in half just by doubling the average age of first-time mothers from eighteen to thirty-five. That’s one reason rats reproduce so much more than leopards do—because they reach sexual maturity so much sooner.”

“Already a problem in that analogy, of course,” Katz said.

“Exactly,” Walter said. “It’s the elitism thing again. Leopards are a ‘higher’ species than rats or bunnies. So that’s another part of the problem: we turn poor people into rodents when we call attention to their high birth rates and their low age of first reproduction.”

“I think the cigarette analogy is a good one,” Jessica said from the far end of the table. It was clear that she’d gone to an expensive college and had learned to speak her mind in seminars. “People with money can get Zoloft and Xanax. So when you tax cigarettes, and alcohol too, you’re hitting poor people the hardest. You’re making the cheap drugs more expensive.”

“Right,” Walter said. “That’s a very good point. And it applies to religion, too, which is another big drug for people who don’t have economic opportunity. If we try to pick on religion, which is our real villain, we’re picking on the economically oppressed.”

“And guns also,” Jessica said. “Hunting’s also very low-end.”

“Ha, tell that to Mr. Haven,” Lalitha said in her clipped accent. “Tell that to Dick Cheney.”

“No, actually, Jessica’s right,” Walter said.

Lalitha turned on him. “Really? I don’t see it. What does hunting have to do with population?”

Jessica rolled her eyes impatiently.

This could be a long day, Katz thought.

“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. That’s what Bill Clinton figured out—that we can’t win elections by running against personal liberties. Especially not against guns, actually.”

That Lalitha nodded in submissive agreement to this, rather than sulking, made the situation clearer. She was still begging and Walter still withholding. And he was in his natural element, his personal fortress, when he was allowed to speak abstractly. He hadn’t changed at all since his years at Macalester.

“The real problem, though,” Katz said, “is free-market capitalism. Right? Unless you’re talking about outlawing reproduction, your problem isn’t civil liberties. The real reason you can’t get any cultural traction with overpopulation is that talking about fewer babies means talking about limits to growth. Right? And growth isn’t some side issue in free-market ideology. It’s the entire essence. Right? In free-market economic theory, you have to leave stuff like the environment out of the equation. What was that word you used to love? ‘Externalities’?”

“That’s the word, all right,” Walter said.

“I don’t imagine the theory’s changed much since we were in school. The theory is that there isn’t any theory. Right? Capitalism can’t handle talking about limits, because the whole point of capitalism is the restless growth of capital. If you want to be heard in the capitalist media, and communicate in a capitalist culture, overpopulation can’t make any sense. It’s literally nonsense. And that’s your real problem.”

“So maybe we should just call it a day, then,” Jessica said drily. “Since there’s nothing we can do.”

“I didn’t invent the problem,” Katz said to her. “I’m just pointing it out.”

“We know about the problem,” Lalitha said. “But we’re a pragmatic organization. We’re not trying to overthrow the whole system, we’re just trying to mitigate. We’re trying to help the cultural conversation catch up with the crisis, before it’s too late. We want to do with population the same thing Gore’s doing with climate change. We have a million dollars in cash, and there are some very practical steps we can take right now.”

“I’d actually be fine with overthrowing the whole system,” Katz said. “You can go ahead and sign me up for that.”

“The reason the system can’t be overthrown in this country,” Walter said, “is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europeans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it. And that’s why I want to get back to what Jessica said about cigarettes.”

Jessica made a beckoning gesture, as if to say, Thank you!

From the hallway came the sound of somebody, Patty, moving around the kitchen in hard heels. Katz, wanting a cigarette, took Walter’s empty coffee mug and prepared a plug of chew instead.

“Positive social change works top-down,” Walter said. “The surgeon general issues his report, educated people read it, bright kids start to realize that smoking is stupid, not cool, and national smoking rates go down. Or Rosa Parks sits down on her bus, college students hear about it, they march in Washington, they take buses to the South, and suddenly there’s a national civil-rights movement. We’re now at a point where any reasonably educated person can understand the problem with population growth. So the next step is to make it cool for college kids to care about the issue.”

While Walter held forth on the subject of college kids, Katz strained to hear what Patty was doing in the kitchen. The essential pussiness of his situation was coming home to him. The Patty he wanted was the Patty who didn’t want Walter: the housewife who didn’t want to be a housewife anymore; the housewife who wanted to fuck a rocker. But instead of just calling her up and saying he wanted her, he was sitting here like some college sophomore, indulging his old friend’s intellectual fantasies. What was it about Walter that so knocked him off his game? He felt like a free-flying insect caught in a sticky web of family. He couldn’t stop trying to be nice to Walter, because he liked him; if he hadn’t liked him so much, he probably wouldn’t have wanted Patty; and if he hadn’t wanted her, he wouldn’t have been sitting here pretending. What a mess.