Catch-22 in 2025

For at least the past twelve years or so I have been enjoying coffee and a crossword puzzle from the Minnesota Star-Tribune every Saturday morning with a friend. In the beginning we met at a local coffee house following the abandonment by my previous coffee klatch—my daughters—who had gone off to college and other locations. During the pandemic when I would not leave the house, Ruven bravely met me at chez moi where in the beginning I made the coffee (always a very excellent brew, saying so myself) and he brought the bagels. During those early mornings I began to recognize that there was no substitute for a New York bagel and over time I sadly declined the fare he would carry over. Ruven then arrived only with the Arts section of the newspaper that contained the Universal crossword puzzle. He carried a pen (!) clipped onto the newspaper and brought his good cheer. We would talk politics and coffee, share some personal stories from the past and the present, rail at the Republicans and the Trump government and talk about books. One Saturday during a light moment in our conversation a reference was made to Major Major Major Major, a character in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, and Ruven commented that Catch-22 was a funny, funny book. I nodded my head in agreement. Now, I had not read the book in years and I picked it off my bookshelf and began to rea and as I read I chuckled aloud. More than once I even guffawed.

And as I was reading in my comfy chair this past evening during the first week of Trump’s presidency, it struck me with not a little alarm that the present seemed to be an auspicious time to be rereading Heller’s novel because the personages and events in the novel seemed too similar to what passes today for government. Catch-22 takes place for the most part on the island of Pianosa, situated in the Mediterranean Sea eight miles south of Elba, where the 256^th Bomber Squadron is stationed. The novel follows the lives (and deaths) of the American service men in World War II who in the fulfillment of their duties are constantly endangered while dropping bombs on the enemy who in turn fire back at the planes and destroying the bombers and killing its crew; the novel narrates the hierarchy of officers who callously order the enlisted men about, and the self-serving staff, like Milo Minderbinder, who use the squadron for their own egregiously self-interested aims and purposes. Milo Mnderbinder for one contracts with the Germans to bomb his own base to fulfill a contract that makes Milo a handsome profit. Colonel Cathcart, who is responsible for increasing the number of missions his men have to fly, considers that “the war was crawling with group commanders who were merely doing their duty, and it required just some sort of dramatic gesture like making his group fly more combat missions than any other bomber group to spotlight his unique qualities of leadership.” One thing that didn’t concern Cathcart was the danger he put his squadron in by continuing to increase the number of missions they had to fly! Rather, Cathcart was concerned with his status and the possibility of his promotion. 

Well, this is not the time or place to analyze this wonderful and frightening novel, except to say that during my reading I grew alarmed at how our current reality under Trump looked too much like the events and personages of the novel. Marx had said “Hegel remarks somewhere that all faces and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”  Trump’s appearance as President for the second time on the world stage appeared to me as farce, dangerous as it seems. That is, what transpires in his administration as responsible governance can only be understood as farcical and incompetent and cannot be understood as anything approaching honest and effective government. His leadership is organized by motives of revenge and greed, and like Heller’s Colonel Cathcart, his leadership is relevant to him only as it increases his wealth and satisfies his illimitably greedy egotism, energies for revenge and grasp at power. Trump’s inauguration (his coronation, as it is turning out) and his brash accusations and lies; his unashamed display of his abysmal ignorance; his appointments of incompetents and unethical candidates for cabinet positions who are charged to enact his will and support his unlimited narcissism and greed and his desire for retribution; his self-aggrandizing harangues all appear to repeat the absurdities of the events and personages in Catch-22. For example, Trump’s acts on the first day of his reign was 1) to pardon the 1600 violent insurrectionists of January 6, 2020 and return these racist, misogynist nazis to the street even as Trump decries the illusory lawlessness rampant in the nation perpetrated by illegal immigrants (whom he refers to as animals and vermin) and by what he terms the left-wing crazies (whom he terms wackos); 2) to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate treaty amid the continuing crisis of global warming and his absurd promise to increase the use of fossil fuel and to drill, baby, drill; 3) to withdraw the United States from the United Nations World Health Organization who Trump has claimed mishandled the corona virus epidemic. This from the man who had suggested that the corona virus pandemic was basically not serious and could be managed easily with quack and dangerous treatments! This from a man who had been treated preferentially and expensively when he early on contracted the disease. Trump’s first actions speak to the dangerous threat to the democracy of the nation. The absurdity and incompetence of the present government seems to me too frightenedly like the events and personages in the novel. On every page of Catch-22 the danger posed by those incompetent, oblivious and self-aggrandizing administrators to the lives of the men they dominate is prominent. So is our nation endangered by Trump and his band of incompetent, billionaire sycophants.

            I am aware that everything any administration does in governing the United States can be wrong, but during the Biden presidency I awoke every day without a sense of fear and dread. Those calmer days are over, and I awaken each morning with a sickly sense of being fouled and threatened. As Yossarian heads out at novel’s end away from the war he admits to being frightened, and Major Danby says, “That’s good. It proves you’re still alive. It won’t be fun.” I’m frightened and alive, but  I know it won’t be fun.

             

 

 

 

            

 

 

 

            
 

 

 

            

Cooking and Life

I suppose that I believe that the act of cooking often serves as a mirror into the character of a life.  There are intimate connections between what we eat and its preparation and who we might be or think we are; as the cliché contends, “We are what we eat.” And the opposite is also true: we eat what we are! There is an ethics to our food consumption even as there is an ethics to how we live our lives. Henry David Thoreau speaks to this relationship when he says, “But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.” I recall foregoing lettuce and grapes to support the strike and unionizing of mostly temporary and under paid farm workers, and I have been long a vegetarian for an assortment of reasons, both political and personal. My father had urged us to eat everything that was on our plate because there were hungry people over there, but he also taught us that it is good to leave something on our plates to remind us that others remain hungry with nothing on their plates. How we ate became a moral activity that reflected who we were. Eating became emblematic of life choices. In his book that recounts the trip Thoreau made with his brother John down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he says, “When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them; or you can boil a hasty-pudding; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer’s house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses the road, and dip into it your sugar,—this alone will last you a whole day;—or if you are accustomed to heartier living, you can buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding into it and eat it with your own spoon out of your own dish. Any one of these things I mean, not all together” (italics added). Thoreau would prepare his meals as he lived, with temperance, economy and moral conscientiousness, and this was consistent with the moral stances he assumed in the world. Thoreau advocated for a life of leanness and liberal concern before liberal was a cynical word for a dubious politics. In “Slavery in Massachusetts” Thoreau had forcefully decried the execution of John Brown who he believed to be a hero and martyr, and Thoreau railed against the surrender of the escaped slave, Anthony Burns, to his Southern owners by the Boston authorities. We approach food as we do our friends, family and neighbors and as we do the exercise of our lives.

Cooking like breathing and movement, sustains life. The yoga instructor quietly repeats, “Breathe, just breathe, align your movement to your breaths.” I have always had difficulty with that process. And the preparation of food, too, requires attention, patience and alertness. So does life. I’ve had considerable difficulty with that process. I too quickly lose patience, attention and alertness. These days I fall easily down the rabbit hole my phone provides me. But recently I twice screened The Taste of Things a film about food and love in which the two categories are intimately related. Indeed, Dodin states that “everything started with something they ate,” referencing the story of Adam and Eve in the garden eating from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. In the relationship between Dodin and Eugénie, Monsieur Dodin first reads the recipe; that is, he creates the dishes, and then Eugénie prepares it. She is the cook! The two have been partners for 20 years. Repeatedly he has asked for her hand in marriage and consistently she refuses him. But during the meal that he prepares for her after her illness, Dodin hides a ring within the dessert, and unwrapping the dessert and discovering the ring, Eugénie smiles and accepts his proposal. Cooking and love are here linked. In one of the final scenes in the film, Eugénie asks Dodin, ““Do you see me more as a wife or a cook?” and Dodin responds, “A cook,” and with the same smile she wore when he proposed, Eugénie says, “Thank you.” That is, Dodin loves Eugénie because her passion for food preparation translates into her passion for Dodin and vice versa. If she were viewed first as a wife, Dodin would be bound to her by custom and by law, but as his cook her passion for food is inseparable from her passion for him. They are what they eat! “And there’s nothing that you eat that I don’t eat, too,” Dodin tells her. Now, I believe the food in this film is certainly more glorious than the bread to which Thoreau has alluded, and they do tend to prepare and eat not any one of these things as Thoreau had recommended, but, indeed, to repast on all of them. The sumptuous multi-course meals they prepare and consume was staggering. But the meal’s preparation does not at all prejudice either Dodin or Eugénie. Though this film is about food, and as a vegetarian I was not overly interested in any of the recipes (except maybe for the Baked Alaska!), I was fascinated by the dedication Dodin and Eugénie enacted to every aspect of the culinary art and to their lives and love. As they devoted their days and years to the food, so did they devote their love for each other. 

I am not so enamored of food nor do I possess or am interested to acquire such skilled preparations in the kitchen; the care and cares with which Dodin and Eugénie’s meals are prepared have only a vague similarity to my culinary efforts and techniques. Well, in fact my meals have very little in common with those of Dodin and Eugénie except perhaps that we both employ food stuffs and prepare them in a kitchen. I have been cooking meals in my kitchen for much of my life, at least for fifty-odd of my seventy-seven years. I have fed my children from my anxious effort in the kitchen. I believe they consumed both, but they have survived and even thrived. Often the meals have turned to odd. Once I tried to prepare a vegan sloppy joe but the dish somehow turned out a bright shade of pink and no one partook.  I am a careless cook: And it may be true that in the same amount of time I have grown as well to be a somewhat dedicated, somewhat successful and careless lover, father, friend and scholar, though perhaps for each with different intensities. 

I am the founding member of an organization I have taken to calling “The Careless Cook Club.” Perhaps there are other yet anonymous potential members. I invite them all to join my association and tell with care the stories of their careless cooking and living.

 

 

Second Time as Farce

I return at times to Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. I am not alone. Marx comments, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Farce is a term that refers to something that is meant to be serious but that has become ridiculous. Marx suggests that though men do make their own history, they do not make it under circumstances of their choosing; they make it under circumstances that are drawn from the past into the present. Marx then suggests why events turn to farce. He writes, “And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.” The present in borrowed names, clothes and manners pretending it is the past become farce just as the skits in Saturday Night Live that mimic the current political situations and characters. The present becomes farce and though funny it is also sad. Freud will suggest that often behavior represents the return of the repressed and in the present those behaviors look ridiculous and inappropriate. I suppose that if Trump’s first presidency was tragic—and it certainly was for the nation, democracy and decency—then this second one will be farce. I have only to look at his choice of cabinet members and presidential advisors to recognize that whatever seriousness might have once existed in the office of the presidency has been by him and his minions in the present lost.

Trump often describes himself as a great man: he refers to his first term of office as the greatest in history!  His lies are laughable. Great man? Isaiah Berlin says, “What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognize their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.” Not exactly a perfect description of Donald Trump but certainly close enough a portrayal of this very ignorant, pathologically narcissistic man. In fact, however, Trump takes responsibility for very, very little, preferring instead to blame others for his own self-serving and ill-informed decisions. In his posturing as “a great man” he reminds me of Seinfeld’s George Constanza who passes himself off to others as whatever is at the moment convenient: a marine biologist, an architect, a lingerie salesperson! George is all farce. So is Trump. George is harmless but Trump is dangerous.
           And sometimes it has seemed to me that other second iterations do occur as farce. In Gustav Flaubert’s 1869 novel Sentimental Education, I find a description very much reflective of our time. Flaubert might have intended sarcasm, but the population that is described was all too real and dangerously serious. In the years following the suppression of the rebellion of 1848, itself a rebellion appearing to Marx as farce, Flaubert’s narrator describes the social scene and politics,

. . . everyone agreed on the urgent need for decentralization . . . to divide Paris into numerous high streets and re-establish villages, transfer the seat of government to Versailles, put the university in Bourges, do away with libraries, entrust everything to the general staff. And they extolled country life, t, the uneducated man naturally having more sense than everyone else! Hatred was rife: hatred against primary school teachers and wine merchants, against philosophy classes, history lessons, novels, red waistcoats, long beards, all independence, any display of individuality. For it was necessary to restore the principle of authority, no matter where it came from . . .

I could not help but compare this sentiment in what is a very political novel about events in France during the crises of mid-19th century to our present-day atmosphere of the ascendent Republican regime. Though I don’t suspect that Trump wants to move the capital of the nation to say, Mar-a-Lago, he does seem to be attempting to brand the world by his arrogance, greed and self-serving posturing. His boasts that he would buy Greenland and re-invade Panama exemplify his ignorance and bullying stances in the world. And wouldn’t his threat to jail his critics and close the media that exposes his profound ignorance sound farcically like the Reign of Terror during the latter years of the French Revolution, a history of which Trump must be woefully oblivious.  I am considering the banning of books, the criminalization of librarians who continue to advocate for free speech, the spewing of calumny and hatred that vomits from the mouths of Trump and his acolytes, the condemnation of education and teachers by people who know very little about education and who attack the schools and teachers for promulgating justified criticism of the nation. The attempt by Trump and his appointed minions to dismantle the government and leave those most powerless and least capable to the whims of whoever is in temporary power at the moment appears to me as a blatant exercise of cruelty and power grabbing. I have wondered how it could be possible that a novel written more than two centuries before could describe our present situation now understood as farce.

And then there is this, spoken not by Greta Grunberg or any other contemporary Jeremiah apprehensive about the effects of climate change and global warming. “The Russian forests are groaning under the ax, millions of trees are being destroyed, the dwelling of wild beasts and birds are despoiled, rivers are subsiding, drying up, wonderful landscapes vanish never to return, and because lazy man hasn’t sense enough to stoop down and pick up fuel [peat] from the ground . . . Man is endowed with reason and creative powers so that he may increase what has been given to him, but up to now he has not created but only destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wild life is becoming extinct, the climate is ruined and every day the earth gets poorer and uglier. . .” No, this sentiment is not spokenBy Greta Thunberg in this century but by Mikhail Lvovich Astrov, a doctor, in Anton Chekhov’s 1897 play, Uncle Vanya. As Yogi Berra so aptly said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

I have often wondered why there is nothing new under the sun! How could things happen twice as Marx had said the first time as tragedy and then again as farce. This is not to say that the ever-present epidemics and genocides or climate denigrations are farce—but my experience teaches me that Marx is correct. This past pandemic so vehemently mishandled by so-called leaders was a replication not only of the occurrence of the epidemic of the flu in 1918. Wikipedia reports that the pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when censorship in the warring countries suppressed bad news to maintain morale, but newspapers attributed the outbreak in Spain, creating a false impression of neutral Spain as the epicenter and that led to the "Spanish flu" misnomer. Limited historical data makes the geographic origin of the pandemic indeterminate, with competing hypotheses on the initial spread. Sounds so familiar to  Trump's response to the 2020 Corona outbreak. It sounds not a little like President Reagan’s refusal to recognize and provide aid during the AIDS crisis. George Bush’s failed Afghan war occurred not a dozen years after his father’s invasion of Iraq. Today’s climate crisis continues the environment’s destruction as it did in 1897. Do we really learn nothing? Isaiah Berlin writes,
 

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-indued myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.

Ignorance and weakness rules, as always. Isaac had re-dug the wells his father had previously turned, and like his father before him passed his wife Rebekah off as his sister to Pharaoh even as Abraham had told Pharaoh that Sarah, his wife, was his sister. We are the product of our histories and that we unconsciously repeat. Our acts become farce. Freud has taught that understanding those histories is a first step toward changing direction but those that Berlin describes opt for ignorance rather than understanding. For these individuals—sometimes turned mob—what is sought is comfort and ease, a sense of stasis in identities and relationships. Once in power always in power. Such people want no disruption to the lives they live, no threat to their often-imagined and even unearned place in the world. As a result they repeat the life they have lived in changed circumstances and their responses to circumstances are not reflective of that change. Often, they are ridiculous. Second time as farce. They repeat because in the present they live out their pasts and do not and would not know it. Jacob’s cry that God was in that place and he didn’t know describes for me these myopic individuals. These individuals alone and in groups know no other way and would not learn an alternative. 

It amuses me to consider, then, David Brooks’ article in The Atlantic. Brooks decries the meritocracy established by James Conant, the President of Harvard in the post-World War II years. Brooks writes that Conant’s intention was “to eliminate admission criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.” Hence begins the development of standardized tests to measure academic achievement. But as it turns out, academic achievement is intimately connected to financial resources: affluent parents spend a great deal of money to ensure that their children can enter elite institutions. Schools in high socioeconomic communities have far greater resources than schools in less affluent areas; high SES parents have the means to purchase elite private schools and tutors to greatly increase their academic achievements. But Brooks’ article echoes Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, but Brooks neglects to cite Lemann’s work nor the work of hundreds of educators that actually includes me who have long argued against the present educational establishments that has moved steadily towards inequality by giving priority to standardized, scientific testing.

First time as tragedy and second as farce.