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Catch-22, Dad

Monday, Sept. 15, 1997

I picked up a copy of "Catch-22 " last weekend after watching an interview with the author as part of The Learning Channel's Great Books Festival. It made me realize how much I was missing by not having read the book, although I was familiar with the meaning of its title. How I got through high school and college without reading it remains a mystery, although I refer back to those trendy mini courses I mentioned earlier that were in vogue when I was in school.

Published in 1961, the book details the insanities surrounding an Army Air Corps bombardier stationed off the coast of Italy in World War II. The novel by Joseph Heller is fictitious but speaks volumes about contradictions in our society then and now. But you probably already knew that, having not had trendy '70s mini courses in your school curriculum.

That my father also flew on bombing missions in Italy for two years during World War II makes the book to me altogether more personally vital because my father rarely speaks of those days. A movie about the Memphis Belle, similar in topic except those flyers were based in England, brought me closer to understanding the man who is an enigma in my life. My father cannot bear to watch it. I asked him to tell me about it. He didn't want to.

I doubt if he is able to read Catch-22 at all.

When I muster up some courage, I'll ask him again. I don't want to bring up something that I know is painful to him, but sooner or later I've got to know. The sooner the better.

When I was learning to develop film and make prints in 1979, he gave me some film he had taken in Italy and smuggled home. It had been stashed for years in the top drawer of his desk in the basement, along with several medals tossed in with pencils and erasers. It was precious. It was undeveloped. I asked him if I could develop it for him. I took it to the darkroom and managed to bring out some prints. One of them simply showed his tent and his dog, a stray he had befriended. He looked at it for a long time.

Following are a few choice passages from "Catch-22":
(Scribner Paperback Fiction, Simnon & Schuster Inc., New York)

"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. ... He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. 'As ye sow, so shall ye reap,' he counseled one and all, and everyone said, 'Amen.' "

"Colonel Cathcart had courage and never hesitated to volunteer his men for any target available."

"Milo had been caught red-handed in the act of plundering his countrymen, and , as a result, his stock had never been higher."

"So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans."

"He had lived for almost twenty years without trauma, tension, hate, or neurosis, which was proof to Yossarian of just how crazy he really was. His childhood had been a pleasant, though disciplined one. He got on well with his brothers and sisters, and he did not hate his mother and father, even though they had both been very good to him."

In our town, the mothers are at it again. A policy of strict radio silence is back in the school lunchrooms, where students may only "breathe and eat," one teacher-monitor says. We moms just want the kids to be able to visit, socialize, and talk in soft voices, like its says in the school district handbook.

A friend of mine was stunned when she walked into the cafeteria to join her daughter on her birthday last week to find a teacher blowing a dog whistle and shouting for silence. She later found herself confronting the principal, one thing lead to another and before she knew it she was saying something about abuse of authority creating rebellious children who may one day bomb an abortion clinic. Had I been there I may have added something about how all they're learning is how to be little Nazi automatons.

Beware the wrath of a room mother scorned. We've also just learned that the students at the new Fifth and Sixth Grade Center (yes, that's what they named it) won't get to have the traditional Halloween, Christmas and Valentine parties they got when they were part of the grade school system.

Out on the web, today's site gathers stories contributed from around the world at "In Memory of World War II." Another good site I found today is "Dad's War: Telling And Finding Your Dad's World War II Story."

www.webcurrent.com
c. 1997-1998 Julie Wolpers, Webcurrent Communications

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