Yossarian

Y’all, my job is getting in the way of my writing. Not because of the volume of work, which is fairly modest, but rather because of the depressing futility of it. I’ve met a lot of good people in my years in the web hole, but while they usually move on after a while—usually when they realize what a massive and stupid Gordian knot they’ve signed on to untangle—I continue to stand at my post, partly I suppose in the service of a wicked messiah complex—in which I believe that given the time and effort I can solve the problems that negligence and ignorance and a lack of resources have produced—and partly because the thought of trying to put on a happy face in order to snow a potential employer on the proposition that I’d like nothing more than to continue in this dying field and help them sell more widgets… well it’s is just a huge downer, and it takes all of two minutes scanning job listings before I want to stick a fork in my eyes. Computers, folks, are not fun anymore.

It’s hard to write when my brain is occupied with this foolishness. I can’t think the thoughts I’d like to think—these idiotic career concerns just circle my cerebral cortex like the world’s most boring sharks.

And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. And man does it ever go fast. I was wrestling with this same bullshit a year ago! And my solution then was more or less the same as my solution now: I should write a book.

Of course, the last time I said I’d write a book I meant immediately and only after I announced it did I realize that I had about three years’ worth of research to do. I did do research for a while—maybe three or four months. And then something happened; I don’t even remember what. I shelved the idea indefinitely.

Well, the new book idea has one great virtue: no research required. It is a matter of fiction, however, and I don’t want to short the planning. So let’s not consider this an announcement so much as a hint. An indication of things to come, in much the same way a tropical depression off the coast of Africa could either settle down and vanish or gear up and destroy an American coastal city. An idea is bubbling in my mind and may or may not mean the end of Corpus Christi.

As it happens there is an element in this idea that touches on one of my favorite writers, Joseph Heller. I could probably write something, right now, about Heller. He is always apropos to the moment, and thinking about him gets my blood circulating in spite of myself. But it’s late, and I thought instead I’d offer up a piece I wrote several years ago for a magazine by the name of Public Books. It’s short but it’s the product of a lot of labor (and thus does not now require much editing). I was asked to write this piece, and this I dutifully did. I sent it to the editor, with whom I had a warm relationship at the time, and then waited to see it in print. It never happened, and the editor abruptly stopped responding to my emails. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s a shitty piece of writing, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Joseph Heller arrived in my life like a burst of flak. I never saw him coming. My grandmother had a hardbound copy of Good as Gold on her prodigious bookshelf, but as a kid interested primarily in baseball and model railroads, the title blended seamlessly with the old Hollywood exposés that formed the backbone of her reading life. She also had a book about Oh, Calcutta which was far more interesting because it was full of pictures of naked people. So when Heller finally grabbed me by the nose and began to tell me something, he was entirely a stranger.

It was a high school mandate. My bestie Aaron and I were assigned a project involving Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Heller’s Catch-22. I was a recalcitrant student to put it mildly and was liable to balk even at an appealing assignment. The man — Al Gaines — who gave me the great gift of these two writers called me a jackass upon reading my senior English term paper. He knew well of what he spoke, and likely even tempered his language in that assessment. He was a wise old fellow though; giving me Heller and Vonnegut was like giving a bag of China White to Sid Vicious. I read them and was hooked.

With Vonnegut I went wide, reading everything I could find. I devoured his novels, his essays, and his autobiography. I knew his work, his life, and I could effortlessly conjure up an image of him in my mind. With Heller, on the other hand, I went deep. Catch-22 was the whole of Joseph Heller to me, and I read the book so many times I had large passages committed to memory. Later in life I took stabs at Something Happened and Closing Time, which purports to be a sequel to Catch-22. Neither held my interest and both fell by the wayside before I was two thirds through them. As for Heller himself, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup if he was wearing a name badge.

As briefly as I can put it, Catch-22 is the story of John Yossarian, a World War II Army Air Force bombardier who has decided—unilaterally—that he’s finished fighting. It’s a flurry of a book. It reads like chaff dumped out of the back of an airplane to avoid radar detection. Comprised of hundreds of little stories, told and retold and told again in ever greater detail and with ever growing inanity, spiraling slowly from farce to tragedy. What seems at first to be silly slapstick morphs into nightmare, culminating in a dark and cruel revelation that, when I read it now, still gives me chills.

It is one of the great satires of the 20th century, exposing the heartlessness of a military bureaucracy that ruined so many of the lives around Heller during the war — a heartlessness we probably take for granted now. We’re trained to think of satire as merely a mode of comedy in this age of flabby, middlebrow, Internet-enabled snark. The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, and Southpark all wear this indistinction from time to time—funny, even occasionally on target, but just as often sloppy appeals to arrested adolescence.

If we can tighten our intellectual belts a notch, we can glimpse what we tend to forget about satire: it’s not caricature—it’s a mirror. “It’s funny because it’s true” is not just an expression. It’s why R. Crumb takes Polaroids of telephone wires and transformers and the like for verbatim use in his drawings: as he remarks, you can’t make that stuff up. If you’ve ever had five bosses, or sat mortified while your real estate agent gets in a shouting match at your house closing, or watched in dismay as your political system flies apart like a second-hand Fiat, you might be familiar with the odd frisson that comes with the realization that, for example, Idiocracy seems more like documentary than comedy.

Catch-22 is a round of sheer unvarnished, unmitigated truth. Taken as a whole it seems an impossibility, and yet every crazy circumstance Heller creates is easily found in the quotidian world, and it is for this reason that Yossarian is so dear to my heart, and particularly at this time in my life and that of our nation. He too is true. Though he wears the mask of the fool, his world is revealed, bit by bit, to be insane. Against that backdrop he is in fact the only sane and moral character in the book. I would never be so arrogant as to say that I am Yossarian, but I strive to be like him. As often as not this can leave me feeling like the contrarian, the stick in the mud, the fool.

And indeed sometimes I am the fool. That’s not such a bad thing however. What Yossarian taught me—what I bring with me into the world—is a simple truism about contributing to an insane system, or not: that it’s better to be the one fool than one more.