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.