'Heller’s book, an allegory for life’s mayhem, is as prescient today as when it was published at the threshold of America’s foray into Vietnam.' Just in time for a new miniseries, JeffreyLAT writes on 'Catch-22':
and last year’s “Frankenstein in Baghdad.” Each work contains slivers of truth that glimmer in a wider surrealism about the reach and consequence of war.
The term “Catch-22” became part of the American vernacular, shorthand for ludicrous and contradictory undertakings. At once comic and tragic, the novel mirrored what was to come, including the inflated enemy body counts and White House lies of Vietnam. Moments in the Iraq war seemed as though they had been scripted by Heller:
Trump would later switch tactics and say of his nemesis: “We fell in love …. He wrote me beautiful letters.” One of book’s most indelible characters is Milo Minderbinder, a wheeling-dealing mess officer and unabashed capitalist, who flies around Europe trading in black-market cotton, dates, zinc, M&Ms and oranges. His is the fictional precursor to military contracting firms such asand Blackwater. Milo makes soldiers believe they are shareholders in a vast corporation that can profit from war without becoming distracted by morality.
Novelist Susan Straight, who teaches a fiction class on war and love at UC Riverside, remembers being angered at the book’s treatment of women when she first read the novel decades ago. “ ‘Catch 22’ is a reminder that women writers who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s were told that the ‘spirit guides’ to the world of fiction and narrative were masculine novelists like Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad.
The officers and soldiers in “Catch-22” are a kaleidoscope of delusion, ego, incompetence, lunacy and the dizzying agendas that veer through folly and fury. The chaplain lacks “ecclesiastical aplomb.” The doctor is a brooding hypochondriac; a lieutenant’s cheeks shake “with gusts of anguish.” The daring yet insecure Col. Cathcart oozes with conceit and endless schemes to impress his superiors. And Capt. Black wants his men to swear loyalty oaths before meals.
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