Catch-22, or Why Unconditionally Loving the Military Industrial Complex is Kinda Cringe, actually.
More like Catch These Hands
Catch-22 is now a common phrase thanks to the book with the same name, a zany postwar rumination on the insanity of military bureaucracy, the inherent disrespect for human lives engendered in the highly political nature of career development in the military, and the insane leaps of logic that must be made to justify the atrocities of war. As you can imagine from this description, it is absolutely hilarious.
Our main character, a man named Yossarian and a certified crazy person, is languishing in the medical tents on base. He has been stricken, he says, by intense pains in his side brought about by a bout of a non-specific liver disease that has the bad luck of flaring whenever he needs to fly a combat mission. Yossarian has had the privilege of flying over forty eight separate combat missions over a variety of World War II targets, mostly in the European theater, and he has decided that his commanding officers are sick of his nonsense and are trying to kill him. An understandable conclusion to reach when he explains that his commanding officer, one colonel Cathcart, wants to be seen as brave by the top military brass and be made available for promotion. The best way for a commanding officer to rise through the ranks is to be a bold, courageous, leader of men, one who runs a complexly disciplined unit full of the baddest, toughest, hardest, throbbing-ist, men from all corners of the great nation of America, a group of questionably heterosexual, top-gun-esque wildcards who might fly the most dangerous, even the borderline suicidal missions, without a second thought. Cathcart achieves this by volunteering his team to fly nearly every mission. At this point, it should be mentioned that Colonel Cathcart never actually has to participate in the operations themselves, because he is far too busy in command cost doing paperwork. Requisition forms don't fill themselves out. And he has to keep asking other units for their reserves because his men keep, selfishly and with great disrespect for the military that provided them all their fancy training and equipment, not returning from their borderline suicidal missions.
Yossarian is one of the lucky few who has managed to survive this grueling barrage of suicide attacks, and has decided he will not fly another combat mission if he can help it. To do this, he has fake, then tried to cultivate a debilitating liver condition, threatened to go insane and tried to get himself sectioned, or by the end of the book, has abandoned all pretense of attempting to do the noble, heroic thing demanded by war and blow up random huts in the Italian countryside full of women and babies (Current or future fascists probably; One can never be too careful) and is dropping his bombs as soon as possible and flying like a goddamn maniac out of the danger zone. Not so much on the highway to the danger zone but more desperately trying to get off on the next exit of the danger zone and causing a massive, multi-car pile-up in his wake that leaves no survivors. Ironically, this insistence on aerial acrobatics makes him one of the favorite and most effective pilots, because flying a mission with Yossarian is the safest flying such a mission can possibly be.
However, Yossarian does have one crippling flaw by the standards of the United States military bureaucracy; He is undeniably, unaccountably, disproportionately, crazier than a mad hatter huffing bath salts. The military comes to this conclusion because Yossarian keeps expressing a deep unease at flying more combat missions and with the nature of war in general, which the top brass absolutely cannot understand. Obviously, the strategic importance of risking their lives to blow up random Italian villas or smuggle goods all along the European coastline to pay brides to the generals is so self-evidently rational that no one serious person could question it. His lack of understanding is proof of his mental incapacity, but his relative shrewdness in other areas is proof that he is, in fact, not insane, and faking it to avoid flying more combat missions. When Yossarian reports himself as insane to the doctor, the highly depressive, self-absorbed doctor who spends most of the appointment complaining about his bitch of a wife, Yossarian is given the following dilemma; Anybody claiming they are crazy is obviously not crazy, because it takes a rational intelligence to decide that they will forfeit their duties as a bombardier and get themselves put in a psych ward and fly no more combat missions. This is the first of many examples of the many catch-22's of the military bureaucracy, and they only get more outrageous and comic from here. Another highlight of the book is when Clevenger, one of Yossarian's fellow soldiers, is being persecuted by the officer corps and by lieutenant Scheisskopf in particular. But of course, because the action board that is investigating Clevenger is not some barbaric, medieval show trial, Clevenger has the right for an officer to defend him. However, the only officer that has the requisite expertise in the case to be Clevenger's defender is, also, Lieutenant Scheisskopf. Clevenger is found guilty on all counts and punished by, you guessed it, more combat missions.
The novel does a great job of mixing the dark comedy of these massive bureaucratic structures with some interesting structuralist criticism. For those that don't know, there have been lots of studies on the nature of massive organizations, be they fortune five hundred companies, militaries and the military industrial complex, and federal government superstates like those of National Socialist Germany or Fascist Italy. There is an inherent logic that these behemoths do follow, believe it or not. As pithily summarized by the philosopher of science Karl Popper, a system is what it does. Or systems generate a kind of internal logic in which the normal rules of reality are disregard for a kind of systemic logic that interfaces with real world. These massive systems also have the ability to change the world enough so that the things they do that seem profoundly irrational are actually informed by a rationalistic ethos that they can superimpose on everyone else's reality, usually through the use of force. For example: Fiat currency. A government wishes to pay for things it cannot afford. Said government has given itself the power to issue arbitrary fiat currency with no value other than the government validates it. The government prints a bunch of money and pays for the thing it cannot, technically, afford. This massively devalues the currency, sure, but devaluing the currency really only hurts the middle class voting block, who are an ever shrinking minority of citizens. The hyper rich don't care because their wealth is in things that cannot be inflated like property or stocks, and the poor subsist on the government dole regardless and are maybe dimly aware the welfare money they receive doesn't go quite so far as it used to, but they respond by advocating for the government to produce more wealth for them to hand out and the cycle begins anew. In a bizarre, roundabout way, this system does function, but only because people believe that it works, and therefore superstructures do things that seem totally irrational from an outsider but are actually informed by a subseptate, internal logic, that they force everyone else to participate in. Yes, eventually reality will catch up with them, but by the time it does the gerontocracy will be dead and the fallout of worthless currency and empty governmental promises will be someone else's problem.
Yossarian falls victim to the malicious internal logic of the military time and time again. The incentive structure is such that the leaders want as many combat missions as possible out of the fewest number of soldiers. Pushing your unit to the brink over and over is the best way to secure a promotion (also autistically hyperfixating on parading about in military dress uniforms but that's another subplot) so the commanders keep raising the upper limit of how many missions soldiers are expected to fly. The commanders don't care about the lives of the soldiers because the incentives are set up for them to view them as expendable at best and problems at worst, problems they can solve by sending them out on ever more dangerous missions. There are some real villains in this piece, like Yossarian's moronic, rule-following co-pilot who also refuses to pay for prostitution because that’s immoral but will rape them because that is better somehow, I guess, and colonel Cathcarth, who is incompetent beyond compare, but the real problem is always the fact that a bunch of people who are, at least on the whole, fundamentally decent people, who are thrust at various levels into a military complex whose goal is to kill as many people as possible. As is the nature of war, but it makes for a grim read.
When he is first introduced, Yossarian comes across as unlikeable; He lies to get out of his duty, seems to have a bit of a persecution complex, and generally is hated by the men that he serves with. But Heller is pulling a bit of a bait and switch here, because Catch-22 isn't structured like a traditional novel. We meet Yossarian at his lowest point, we get some blanks filled in a seemingly random order, then we have an incredibly well done climax with a quite wonderful ending that I will not spoil but suggest that you experience. Yossarian does all of the things that war novel protagonists are not supposed to do; He is not a flag waving jingoist making speeches about the glory and honor of self-sacrifice, he doesn't care about the success of most of his missions, he doesn't seem invested in winning the war beyond an understanding that he would likely die if he was captured by the germans and doesn't wish to die, which fair enough. He actually goes out of his way to defend the humanity of the Germans and points out the hypocrisy of the United States military, flag waving and grandstanding about Nazi and Japanese war crimes while firebombing civilian centers and blowing up targets of no strategic importance but breaking the morale of an enemy that is already certain to lose. The generals keep ordering missions that they know have basically zero impact on the overall war effort but will go on their lapel as another successful bombing raid which will finally impress their horrible cunt of wife and their bloodthirsty hellhounds of superiors. It makes some interesting and honestly quite daring points about the narrative we hold in our head about both war and our country's role in it, not to mention the good old sausage making and office politicking that goes into running any centralized enterprise. There are always going to people who want to be in charge, there are always going to be psychopaths that are hell bent on becoming The Guy In Charge, and people who are unscrupulous enough to spend lives to become The Guy In Charge are almost always both the ones that make it to being the dictator and should not, under any circumstances, allowed to be in charge.
Catch-22 is also remarkably pertinent as a novel, but one that probably doesn't make the points that the author intended. Joseph Heller was pretty leftie in his inclinations and wanted to make a point about the inherent absurdity and inhumanity of government systems, which is fair enough, but then does the common leftist bait and switch. He insists that government systems are not incentivized to care for the common man and mostly a powergame for ugly psychopaths the way that hollywood is for beautiful psychopaths (based af) but then turns around to blame it all on McCarthyism and starts insisting that if we only internalize and implement his very specific left wing style of governance, then all of these problems will be solved. Once everyone running the country agrees with me, Heller implies, all the corruption, backroom deals, and backstabbing politicians will simply vanish into the ether, replaced by the warm glow of the angelic bureaucrats governing judiciously and lovingly, with everyone's best interest at heart. Wince-inducing.
However, Heller is kind enough to mostly keep his novel focused on the criticism of the system, which is where his novel shines brightest. It is a funny, tight, fast-paced novel, and as we hurtle toward the technological bureaucracy with its quais-facisitic fusing of state power and the vast disaggregate system of surveillance/milieu control that is social media, its novel's like this one that remind us the technocratic oligarchs are just as human as you or me, the only difference being is they have an unprecedented ability to shape the public's perception and no meaningful control mechanism, and access to the kinds of data that the out of touch buffoons from Heller's pages could only dream of, plus the actual sophistication to curate information that forever divides the electorate in warring camps arguing about nonsense while the politicians take advantage of all the distracting rhetoric and make themselves personally wealthy enough to buy a few luxury nuclear bunkers to survive whatever the coming apocalypse will turn out to be with enough infant blood and hair plugs to sustain them until the next epoch, where they will rise again from their tombs and create again the same vast tower of babel until it comes crumbling down over and over, ashes pile upon ashes over the gardens of Babylon. Sweet dreams. Also read Catch-22 or something. I need a drink.