Al Arkin in “Catch 22”
My novelist friend Rachel Kranz sent me a petition letter she recently received from a veteran, one Hayleigh Perez, that was such a perfect instance of a Catch-22 that I had to share it, especially since I’m currently teaching Joseph Heller’s novel. Here’s an excerpt from the letter:
North Carolina has been my home since 2006: I own a house, pay taxes and vote here. But because I was deployed to serve outside the state — in Iraq and Texas – [UNC Pembroke] told me I’m not considered a resident, and forced me to pay higher tuition to go to their school.
It’s not easy for the men and women who are serving to leave our homes and families when we’re asked to. But I think it’s outrageous that veterans who want to go to school are being forced to pay more because of it. I started a petition on Change.org asking UNC schools to stop discriminating against veterans who have been stationed out of state. Click here to sign my petition. . .
After the University rejected my appeal to have my residency status changed, I found out that thousands of veterans all over the country are being charged out-of-state tuition because we served abroad – and the University of North Carolina school system, which enrolls over 20,000 GI Bill recipients, is one of the largest culprits of tuition discrimination against veterans.
As I’m sure you know, “Catch-22” is the “we’ve got you coming or going” or “heads we win, tails you lose” philosophy that governs the military in the novel. Here it is explained:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
So in the case of Hayleigh Perez, she joins the military to get a college education but, by joining the military, she forfeits a college education—or at least affordable in-state tuition.
The astuteness of Heller’s novel was pointed out to me years ago by a World War II veteran (my wife’s stepfather) who, like Heller, participated in the Allied invasion of Italy as a member of the air corps. When I asked him if he had read Catch-22, he replied, “That novel is so true!” Heller, he said, deeply understands the insanity of military culture.
For Perez, however, the insanity lies not in the military but in the civilian culture dealing with the military. And this isn’t the only instance I found. Heller’s novel also exposes a huge election year oversight.
America is currently engaged in the longest war in its history, but no one is talking about it. Mitt Romney didn’t even mention it in his convention speech, and, when criticized for the omission, replied, “When you give a speech, you don’t go through a laundry list.” Barack Obama, meanwhile, doesn’t want to have to defend a troops surge that met with indifferent success. It’s as though no one wants to acknowledge that we are fighting.
That is what makes the following passage from Catch 22 so apropos. Yossarian has just been released from the hospital, where he has been hiding out from the war:
But Yossarian couldn’t be happy . . . because outside the hospital there was still nothing funny going on. The only thing going on was a war, and no one seemed to notice but Yossarian and Dunbar. And when Yossarian tried to remind people, they drew away from him and thought he was crazy.
Yossarian takes the war personally—as Heller puts it, “strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them”—and in this way he is unlike those around him. That’s because everyone else has fatalistically accepted the war as the new normal. Complaining about it is like complaining about, say, the laws of physics: you come off as crazy.
Unfortunately, the war in Afghanistan has become a new normal for all but those with loved ones involved. The genius of the Yossarian character is that he refuses to normalize the world’s insanity.
While I’m talking election-year politics, here’s one final passage that touches on a current issue, which is Republican efforts to make it harder to vote in a number of battleground states. In case you haven’t been keeping up with GOP voter suppression efforts, they are ostensibly aimed at preventing the virtually non-existent problem of voter fraud. (That itself sounds like a line from Heller’s novel.) Their real rationale, however, is articulated by the obnoxiously cheerful Texan that Yossarian meets in the hospital ward:
Then there was the educated Texan from Texas who looked like someone in Technicolor and felt, patriotically, that people of means—decent folk—should be given more votes than drifters, whores, criminals, degenerates, atheists and indecent folk—people without means.
What has been striking about the voter suppression efforts is that those involved have been so forthright about their motives. Here is Mike Turzai, Pennsylvania House Majority leader, defending a voter ID requirement that would have disenfranchised approximately a million voters:
“We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we’ve talked about for years,” said Turzai in a speech to [Republican State Committee] members Saturday. He mentioned the law among a laundry list of accomplishments made by the GOP-run legislature.
“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
And here’s a statement from an Ohio county Republican Party chairman and elections board member on why weekend voting shouldn’t be allowed—even though Ohio voters experienced 12-hour and longer lines in certain urban areas in 2004, a problem corrected with weekend voting in the 2008 election:
I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine.
As Julia’s stepfather said about Catch-22, “That novel is so true!”
Fortunately, in these two instances the courts have intervened to restore sanity: a federal court suspended Pennsylvania’s voter ID law because of the chaos it was creating, and the U. S. Supreme Court yesterday overruled the efforts of Ohio Republicans to ban early voting. But keep your eyes out for other Catch-22s before the election season is over.
Added note: Rereading the book, I came across another applicable event: Yossarian, who doesn’t want to risk his life bombing Bologna, slips into the strategy room one evening and moves the bomb demarcation line so that it appears that Bologna has been captured. The bombing raid is called off and General Peckham arranges to himself given a medal for the capture of the city.
In operating according to a reality that has been arbitrarily asserted, the military brass are like those partisans (mostly with the GOP) who criticize scientific studies that don’t confirm what they already believe (which at various moments have included negative poll numbers, evidence of global warming, the effectiveness of abstinence education, the effectiveness of tax cuts, and a host of other issues). In the book, we see that people can’t always get away with fabricating reality: Major –de Cloverley goes to Bologna to set up room accommodations for his officers and is captured by the Germans.
Another note: I see that Paul Krugman of the New York Times invoked Catch-22 today, very cleverly calling Romney “Mitt Binderminder” (actual character’s name: Milo Minderbinder) since it appears that his story that he called for “binders full of women” is false: in reality, he was presented with binders by a woman’s group seeking to get more women into high office.
