Thank You, Joseph Heller
I think it’s worth noting the death of people who indelibly mark society with an idea. Like Joseph Heller for his contribution of the term Catch-22. From the book of the same name. And the movie. But the phrase itself was important because it defined the insanity of war and those who run them.
Catch-22 was the story of a U.S. bomber group based in the Mediterranean during World War Two. The rule was that if you were crazy, they’d send you home. But if you hated the fighting and wanted to go home, you weren’t crazy, and couldn’t go home. It was the military that was crazy, of course, thinking that it made sense to win an argument by slaughtering so many on the other side that they decided to concede.
I first read Catch-22 when I was in my early teens. I remember staying up at night with a light on under the covers. And at one point laughing so hard that my mother heard me and came down the hall to find out what was going on. My appetite for the story was insatiable, even with all that I didn’t truly understand, and had never been close to experiencing, even from another descriptions. War movies weren’t like what Heller described. These people were crazy. And they wanted to go home.
I remember two lines from Catch-22 that will be with me until I go home. Heller said, "Men went mad and were rewarded with medals." And "If that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier." I went through my files and found this other quote from Catch-22: "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them."
He wrote other books, and because I felt so appreciative of Catch-22 I read them. It was a little bit of a struggle some times, but in "Good As Gold", he recaptured some of his flair. As in "Lost: one child, age unknown, goes by the name of me." Or "It dawned forcibly upon Gold that there is a nice distinction between ‘incredible’ and ‘unbelievable’ which he'd overlooked all his life." And "Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there."
Heller was a good writer at times, and in Catch-22 he wove a compelling and important account of what’s crazy about the way we live. When will it end? I don’t think Heller knew, but in the rest of his life and his writing, he tried to find out. I think he probably decided it would go on like this. That’s why he wrote the ending he did to Catch-22. It would continue this way until...something happened to change it. Something Happened, it suddenly occurs to me, was the name of Heller’s second novel, but nothing had changed.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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