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corporation that e-markets Third World crafts made by Third World women.
    You see, Ben does adhere to the Buddhist belief in making a “right living,” which mixes in quite nicely with his childhood socialist indoctrination and his somewhat Reaganite entrepreneurial sense.
    Not for Ben the rigid, top-down vertical integration of the Baja Cartel. B&C (and the ampersand is everything, in Ben’s opinion) has a loosely organized, horizontal, flow-out (“Money doesn’t shoot upwardto then trickle down, it flows
out
”) pseudostructure that allows for maximum freedom and creativity.
    Ben’s logic on this is that it’s impossible to organize marijuana dealers anyway (for reasons that are probably obvious), so why try to herd (cool) cats when they do better on their own, anyway. So—
    You wanna sell dope? Cool. You don’t? Cool. You wanna sell a lot? Cool. You wanna sell a little? Cool. Maternity leave? Cool. Paternity leave? Cool. You set your own targets, make your own budgets, set your own salary, it’s
all
cool. You just order however much you want from the Mother Ship and then do your own thing.
    This simple philosophy, plus the care he takes in growing his primo product, has made Ben a very rich young man.
    The King of Hydro.
    The King of Cool.

35
     
    There are, of course, some critics—and Ben is one of them—who will say that Ben can be Ben because Chon is Chon.
    Ben acknowledges his own hypocrisy on this issue.
    (He is nothing but self-aware and self-analytical. See:
    Ben, parentage of.)
    He and Chon even have a noun for it:
    “Hydrocrisy.”
    The hydrocrisy is obvious—Ben strives to be nonviolent and honest in a business that is violent and dishonest.
    “But it doesn’t have to be,” Ben has argued.
    “But it is,” Chon countered.
    “But it shouldn’t be.”
    “Okay, but so what?”
    Well, so what is that Ben has taken 99 percent of the violence and dishonesty out of his business, but that other 1 percent is—
    —where Chon comes in.
    Ben doesn’t need to know what Ben doesn’t need to know.
    “You’re the American public,” Chon tells him.
    And Chon has ample experience with that.

36
     
    Guys dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and the headlines are about
    Anna Nicole Smith.
    Who?
    Exactly.

37
     
    Ben watches CNN in the airport.
    On his way home from the Bongo Congo.
    Etymology—
The Congo River runs through it, and
It used to be called the Belgian Congo, and
It’s fucking nuts there.
    Otherwise known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
    What was Ben the Baddhist doing there?
    Funding psychotherapy clinics for rape victims.
    Traumatized women, multiply raped and often mutilated—first by rebel soldiers, then by the soldiers who were sent to protect them from the previous set of soldiers. So Green Is Green writes checks for health clinics and counselors, for pregnancy and STD tests, and—
    —get this—
    —for instructors to go out to the soldiers and hold workshops to teach that rape and mutilation are—
    wrong.
    Ben leaves the plastic molded chair to hit the porcelain in the men’s room again because he contracted more in the Congo than just the usual Third World Heartbreak and he really hopes it isn’t dysentery (again).
    He sits Luther-like on the john and, in fact, (re)considers his own theology because—
    —while he knows as a Baddhist that men who rape and cut up women should be reeducated not to do that, he also has this impulse that the more effective thing to do would be to just—
    —shoot the fuckers.
    He knows (ever self-reflective) that there’s more to it than that.
    Maybe he’s just sick and tired but he’s also
    sick
    and
    tired
    of seemingly
everything
these days. He feels
    ennui
    depression
    adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because
    —dig a well in the Sudan and the
janjaweed
come in and shoot thepeople anyway
    —buy mosquito nets and the boys you save grow up to
—rape women
    —set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army
—steals them