CATCH-22

I first read Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, in the early sixties when I was on my first enlistment in the military.    The story perfectly chronicled my experience at that time, SNAFU, Situation Normal All Fucked Up.

I am glad I decided to reread it over this holiday season.   Now, being older and life experienced I am able to see depth in this story that speak to the dysfunctional construction of human society and human interaction in general.

The overviews of Catch-22 is the story of Capitan Yossarian, a Second World War bombardier navigator on a B-25 bomber, tasked to fly low altitude bombing missions over heavily protected targets.   The result of every mission is a loss of aircraft and flight crew.  The missions are so dangerous that the Army Air Corps has set a maximum number of missions that air crew members are required to fly, after which crew members will be grounded and rotated back to the States.   The problem with Yossarian’s squadron is that their colonel keeps raising the mission numbers, resulting in flight crew members never rotating out.   Yossarian is certain that if he continues to fly he will be killed.  He appeals to the Squadron doctor to medically ground him.

Here is the catch.   The only condition the squadron doctor is allowed to ground flight crew members, is if a crewman is insane and submits a written request to be grounded.  But in that case the doctor is not allowed to ground the crew member because of Catch-22, which states that if a crew member request to be grounded he is obviously sane and therefore required to fly His scheduled missions. 

This book will not make the reading list of the liberal, woke community because of racist and misogynistic text; it can not fit into their utopian bubble. Though, the attitudes toward women and race were the accepted attitudes, especially in the military, at that time and place. 

  

But for the rest of us that live, and have lived in the gritty world of reality, Catch-22, like George Orwell’s 1984, is an insight into social, political and bureaucratic governance at its most dysfunctional.   

the Ol’Buzzard