Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

And if that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier.

Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

“Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.” There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own 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.

I’ll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.

Major Major’s father had a good joke about opportunity. “Opportunity only knocks once in this world,” he would say. Major Major’s father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.

Major Major signed Washington Irving’s name to one of the documents instead of his own, just to see how it would feel. He liked it.

“It’s the highest kind of justice of all,” Clevinger had gloated, clapping his hands with a merry laugh. “I can’t help thinking of the Hippolytus of Euripides, where the early licentiousness of Theseus is probably responsible for the asceticism of the son that helps bring about the tragedy that ruins them all. If nothing else, that episode with the Wac should teach you the evil of sexual immorality.” “It teaches me the evil of candy.”

Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.

“And don’t let anybody up there push you around,” the brother advised. “You’ll be just as good as anybody else in heaven, even though you are Italian.”

He was someone in the know who was always striving pathetically to find out what was going on. He was a blustering, intrepid bully who brooded inconsolably over the terrible ineradicable impressions he knew he kept making on people of prominence who were scarcely aware that he was even alive.

“Help yourself to a plum tomato, Chaplain. Go ahead, it’s on me.”

There was a sinister and unlikely coincidence exposed that was too diabolical in implication to be anything less than the most hideous of omens.