Casual Cogitations

You may have been either avoiding this book or worse, unacquainted of its entire existence but I suggest you catapult away from any hesitation you retain and read this book . Don't be swayed by the befuddling synopsis or self-described pundits spatting the book every way they can, Catch-22 isn't just a piece of satirical anti-war fiction, mind you, it's much more than that.

An unconventional novel arose from the hand of an unknown author to the stature of a world classic and its messages remain relevant, nay, prophetic for all ages.

For the most part, the many characters carry out their tasks without questioning their own activities or their leaders; they seem happy simply to occupy their time.

Yossarian stands out of this crowd because he asks many questions. He wants control of his life, he wants to live, he “was willing to be victim to anything but circumstances.”

Wanting to escape the bureaucratic machinery makes Yossarian look like a coward to most people around him. For this reason, he is the protagonist, but not exactly a hero in the traditional or conformist sense – he is the anti-hero.

This novel’s world flourishes with characters moving about as an army of ants, running in circular logic from which they cannot step free, nor do many of them seem to care even if they were aware.

Yossarian and Dunbar stand out almost as villains. Yossarian flows against the social current as the anti-hero; he recognizes the absurd logical loops by which others around him consider their lives perfectly normal.

Although most people might view WW II as a highly justified war, it nevertheless played out with all the graft, corruption, and big-money contracts as any other. WW II ushered America into the world theater as a superpower with the moral credibility that would feed the ego-centric hubris of a sleeping giant with an unmatched thirst for power.

Every decade that followed WW II showed America how to become an empire at the cost of the republic, how to garner an emperor’s war power for the President, at the cost of Congressional restraint.

Catch 22 captures the essence of the credulous, poorly educated, and uncritical citizens who follow mindlessly the Pipe Piper of bureaucratic institutions from government, military, and big business.

Heller began writing this novel in the late 1950’s to see it first published in 1961. This period saw the rise of the Truman Doctrine and the Cold War era during which the U.S. fought to ward off any spread of communism in places like Korea.

In order to uphold the Truman Doctrine, the U.S. military budget began its exponential growth into what now fattens into the largest military spending in world history. Heller’s novel satirizes this transformation of America from a republic into an empire that runs on a bloating bureaucratic military-industrial complex, the dangers of which Eisenhower warned.

Given this background, Catch 22 reflects a larger transformation of America than simply a reaction to the Vietnam War. In fact, by 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred and the U.S. was just beginning to escalate toward an official and publicly recognized conflict in Vietnam.

The novel reveals the logical loops in which the citizens run about in their daily occupations. All people need is a logic, an ideology, a belief system to guide them, and they’ll do whatever the program requires for the sake of fitting-in and getting along in life. Catch 22 is a law structured in mindless, uncritical circles.

This circular and absurd logic pervades throughout this story, in almost every conversation between the characters, in their actions and thoughts. It creates an eerie Kafkaesque atmosphere that continues through the real world.

This looping logic could not be more obvious than in America’s present war in Iraq. As a timeless classic, one can now read Catch 22 as if it were written today.

Bush Jr.’s initial justifications for his blind invasion of Iraq were based on lies, now obvious and abundantly proven, about imminent threats of WMD’s and later of terrorism.

When these reasons were proven as valueless as the large quantities of chocolate covered cotton that Heller’s seemingly innocent entrepreneurial character, Milo Minderbinder, sells, Bush Jr. explained that the war was necessary because terrorists overran Iraq. Of course, this statement spins in its own circle because regular Iraqi citizens as well as foreign intruders appeared on the scene as insurrectionists only after the U.S. occupation.

When this reason for war no longer sufficed, Bush Jr. told Americans that we must continue fighting in order to honor the soldiers already killed in battle. Obviously this logic, too, loops on itself into an absurd infinity. If Americans were silly enough to follow this logic, soldiers would go to war endlessly in search of honor of those who died before them regardless of whatever the initial reasons were at the war’s beginning.

We know about the lemmings, the small rodents who run over the cliff only because their companions did so before them. Once the program is put into place, no American is really silly enough to run in step like a mindless hamster on its exercise wheel.

Likewise, the many Generals and other military leaders at the Pentagon could have resigned when they first opposed the unplanned, unjustified invasion. Instead, they held onto their careers and their government salaries, despite their courage to serve the greater good of the country.

Americans are much smarter than that. But then, sometimes reality plays out more phantasmagorically than the most wildly imagined satirical fiction. Sometimes reality is less believable than fantasy.

In Catch 22, Milo Minderbinder’s commercial operations reveal the only realistic reasons for the war despite the double talk of ideological calls to freedom, liberty, and democracy. Economic power drives men to many places and to many endeavors.

Milo Minderbinder represents the small time entrepreneur working the black-market. He claims that his growing enterprise offers benefits. “Every man will have a share.”

Compared to Colonel Carthcart, who sends his men to death only for the sake of his own promotions, Minderbinder’s profiteering seems moral, at least until he does a deal with the Germans to bomb his own squadron. Then his syndicate takes on the power of a multinational that no state laws or national loyalty can restrain.

Again, reality proves more surreal than the fictional satire. During the cavalier cowboy gunfight in Iraq, one wonders where the $9 billion of tax money disappeared?

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

The bureaucracy marches in circles that few, if any, dare to criticize, especially when the propaganda machinery swayed public opinion, as in the spinning world of Catch 22.