Point Austin: Catch-2010

With the scent of fireworks still in the air and the Gulf steadily filling with oil slurry, this seems like a good moment to reread Catch-22. Joseph Heller's 1961 dystopian vision of World War II – in more recent decades remythologized as the Good War – begins to seem more relevant day by day. The U.S. remains mired in two brutal and pointless wars, the economy continues to stagger, and our elected leaders refuse to end the former and cringe at addressing the latter. Their employment program is more troops to Afghanistan; their unemployment program is a thumb to the nose.

Even if they ever get it plugged, the BP Gulf spill will hover like a black cloud of foreboding over the summer of 2010. There is one bittersweet benefit: At the cost of one of our most precious and spectacular natural wonders, the spill has vividly exposed the dismally corrupt relationship between the oil industry and the government's so-called regulators. (It's worth pointing out that recklessly managed drilling had already badly fouled much of the Gulf; this latest outrage has only accelerated the unnecessary damage.)

In the face of such bureaucratic and technological lunacy, we could certainly use a writer with Heller's nose for absurdity. Here he is on his central conceit, the Army's approach to madness.

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 was 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.

Last week, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele had a moment of unexpected sanity when he let slip this truism, "The one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan ... because everyone who's tried over a thousand years of history has failed." In military unison, leaders of both parties moved quickly to pound Steele back into official madness.

It was a moment certainly worthy of Heller.

A Day of Reckoning

The man in charge of enforcing madness in Catch-22 is Colonel Cathcart, who in search of a promotion to general raises the number of bombing missions required to return home whenever a soldier approaches it. Cathcart spends his evenings dividing the events of his day into "feathers in my cap" and "black eyes" – although, because he's entirely dependent on his superiors' opinions of him, he's never too certain which is which.

A year and a half into his term, President Barack Obama is due for a Cathcart reckoning. I wish I could say the feathers readily outweigh the black eyes, but the ledger remains uncomfortably too close to call. Afghanistan has indeed become Obama's war, with an expansion of troops and a commitment to a countrywide "counterinsurgency" strategy that belies the admission by his own generals that there are at most a few hundred al Qaeda members (remember them?) there and in Pakistan. The latest spin, in Afghanistan as well as Iraq, is that his campaign-promised "withdrawal" does not necessarily mean withdrawal – we should expect many years of U.S. military occupation of both countries, in some never-ending bipartisan "transition."

The permanent militarization of our empire, under either party, is now institutional and unfortunately predictable. Less so was constitutional scholar Obama's lack of commitment to the rule of law, either in prosecuting those Bush administration principals who promoted and engaged in illegal wiretapping, rendition, illegal detention, torture, and worse – or even in serious willingness for his own administration to abandon many of those practices. They'd rather indict military whistleblowers. More Heller: "Catch-22 states that agents enforcing Catch-22 need not prove that Catch-22 actually contains whatever provision the accused violator is accused of violating."

I thought better of Obama and his team. I was wrong.

Domestically, the ledger is somewhat better. Despite a recalcitrant Congress, Obama did succeed in addressing the economic free fall and, in its wake, pushed through a health care reform that is not what it could have been but is a major step forward. Obama's Environmental Protection Agency has actually stepped forward to enforce federal anti-pollution laws in Texas. In recent months, the momentum is slowing; with midterm elections in the fall, deficit-slashing is all the rage (hence the ruthless, bipartisan gridlock over unemployment benefits), and the push to regulate Wall Street seems to be fizzling. The rest of the year looks mostly like campaign noise.

That said, I am painfully aware that elections are never about the best possible candidates, but only the best available candidates. Were Hillary Clinton now president, the most visible difference might be Secretary of State (or Education) Barack Obama – Clinton was even more hawkish on Iraq and Afghanistan and less likely to make even minimal progress on the Middle East. The prospect of John McCain was much worse, and he rendered himself unfit for the presidency when he chose as his running mate, simply out of campaign cynicism, a person unfit for any public office at all.

On the whole, not a delightful prospect for public reflection, in this season of mandatory patriotism, economic uncertainty, and ecological brooding. But even in a dark time, Heller's satire provides a spark of hope, if we can only hear it as a call to battle: "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."