Catch America

Catch America

The reaction to Catch-22 constitutes an interesting sequel to the book itself. Ostensibly about World War II, it took off during the Vietnam war. It inaugurates the Sixties in America. Among the more perceptive critics, we find Robert Brustein writing in the New Republic (a magazine for which I used to write). He sees at once that the novel “has much wider implications than a war novel” to encompass “the postwar American world”. He writes: “Through the agency of grotesque comedy, Heller has found a way to confront the humbug, hypocrisy, cruelty, and sheer stupidity of our mass society—qualities which have made the few other Americans who care almost speechless with baffled rage—and through some miracle of prestidigitation, Pianosa has become a satirical microcosm for many of the macrocosmic idiocies of our time”. Those words could describe our present moment—and I don’t just mean Trump’s terrible tenure. I also mean the universities of the last twenty or so years, including the professors. Humbug, hypocrisy, cruelty, and sheer stupidity—these are all too familiar traits. Even worthwhile causes are tainted with them. It is easy to sympathize with the Yossarians of today. It is a world of fiction, paranoia, nastiness, hysteria, conformity, and (yes) sheer stupidity. The world of Catch-22 is the world we are living in, only magnified and extended.