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

SNAFU

SITUATION NORMAL ALL FUCKED UP

When you read the blogs across the internet probably seventy percent of them are doom and gloom.   They expound about things going wrong in their state, their town or the world – and they are right.  Humanity is fucked up.  But there is nothing new. 

The human social condition is like war: there have always been wars and there will always be wars; the weapons change; the venue changes; the participants change but the results is always the same: people die.

The point I am making is: I am 70+ years old and I have seen it all before.  There has never been a time in my lifetime when everything was not fucked up.  My first memories are of the Second World War – then the McCarthy era, Southern states rights and segregation, the Korean War, the Cuban crisis, the Presidents assassination, Vietnam War, integration struggles, race wars, Nixon, Clinton’s blowjob, Russia, the Cold war, Bush years, Iraq…  Then each state, city and town had its own issues: corrupt police forces, corrupt politicians, religious intolerance, murder – rape - riots – carnage – shit, fire and molasses. 

It is amazing that we have the internet and we can express our frustrations and incredulousness with the state of our individual worlds; but nothing has changed and nothing will ever change.   The players will be different, the venues will be different, the crisis of the moment will be different; but the world will remain fucked up – that is the natural order for the human race.  

Most individuals are basically decent people; but as soon as we pack – we heard up – we take power over others we become corrupt.  That’s who we are. 

It is hard to find something positive to blog about – perhaps cats.  

But in the meantime my blog will join the majority seventy percent and continue to express wonder at the insanity the human race brings to bear against itself. 

There is a ZEN story about a man on a journey that builds a boat to cross the river then drags the boat with him for the next hundred miles. 

 

It is good to be cognitive – it is good to be aware – and it is fine to be troubled; but let us remember we all have eighty-six troubles and let’s not drag the boat once we have crossed the river.

Have a good day

the Ol’Buzzard