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Middle Earth various issues, 1967-1968
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11 Oglesby cont. from p. 5 springs from the fact that one group os men repeatedly exposes itself to death in the service of another group, whose aims are not only different but fiercely competitive. Over and over, in this novel which has been so highly praised by Time and Life and other leftwing journals, Heller drives home the point that the officers and the men might as well come from two different nations, that they are united only as the officers are successful in their deceit and deception. 'Almost hung,' wrote Thomas Nashe in the 16th century, 'for another man's rape - and we have in that phrase the crazy close calls and the crazy deaths which the crazy men of Catch-22 endure. Heller does not qualify this opposition so much as a comma's worth It is stark and unrelieved. Whenever we meet in this novel a recognizably sympathetic emotion - a moment of compassion or agony - we are among the slaves. Not that the men are sentimentalized: the there frailty enough in their ranks. But the officers, the rulers, are entirely despicable. Lacking even the bitter merits of their violence, they are not even bold or cunning. There is nothing new in the military slave's hatred of his military master; we have been hearing about that at least since The Naked and the Dead. But Norman Mailer at least endowed his General Cummins with a well-shaped and sometimes commanding intellect. In Mister Roberts, Thomas Heggin gave us a ship's captain who would be perfectly at home in Catch-22, but on the horizon of that world there were other ships and other captains whose goodness and legitimacy were in fact praised in the hero's death. From Here to Eternity has its share of officer lunatics, but their madness is never something to laugh at. In Catch-22, the officers are denied even the marginal virtues they might appear to possess. Culure, for example, that standard shield of class, is allowed to surface only in order to become more evidence of the officers' vanity and small-mindedness. When Nately is killed and Yossarian therefore refuses to fly any more missions, Colonel Korn days, 'Who does he think he is - Achilles?' Not a bad comparison, in fact: Korn knows something about Achilles besides the thing about the heel and applies what he knows justly, if contemptuously, to Yossarian's rebellion. But Heller destroys the effect by letting us in on a secret: 'Colonel Korn was pleased with the simile and filed a mental reminder to repeat it the next time he found himself in General Peckham's presence.' So instead of being impressed, we are amused: in his unrelieved vanity, and ambition, Korn has been caught in the act of fondling his knowledge. These officers, moreover, are not merely officers, for the reason mainly that this army is not merely an army. The army of Catch-22 is rather a little world which mirrors the larger, overarching world of which it is an offspring and a function. It is an image of America. The values in the name of which the officers direct their peculiar little wars of ambition and betrayal are identical with the values by which the naive maniac of capitalism Milo Minderbinder, is exonerated by an America he had seemed to betray. 'Won't you fight for your country?' Colonel Korn demanded of Yossarian, emulating Colonel Cathcart's harsh, self-righteous tone. 'Won't you give up your life for Colonel Cathcart and me?' Yossarian tensed with alert astonishment when he heard Colonel Korn's concluding words, 'What's that?' he exclaimed. 'What have you and Colonel Cathcart got to do with my country? You're not the same.' 'How can you separate us?' Colonel Korn inquired with ironical tranquility. 'That's right,' Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically. 'You're either for us or against us. There's no two ways about it.' 'I'm afraid he's got you,' added Colonel Korn. 'you're either for us or against your country. It's as simple as that.' 'Oh, no, Colonel. I don't buy that.' Colonel Korn was unruffled. 'Neither do I, frankly, but everyone else will. So there you are.' What is it exactly that everyone else is buying when he buys the inseparability of the country and the colonels? In the first place, he buys the ethic of mindless ambition and cut-throat deceit. 'Why does he, Cathcart, want to be a general?' asks Yossarian, and Korn answers: 'Why? For the same reason that I want to be a colonel. What else have we got to do? Everyone teaches us to aspire to higher things. A general is higher than a colonel, and a colonel is higher than a lieutenant colonel. So we're both aspiring.' And in the second place, he buys capitalism, a very pure, very unGalbraithian variety with all its old impulses toward monopoly and Mammonism wholly intact; along with the Korns, the Cathcarts, and the Peckhams, that is he buys Milo Minderminder. Not exactly an appealing purchase. It is no doubt because the purchas is in fact so terribly unappealing that Catch-22 has so often been taken as a satirical or even a farcical novel. Maybe there is some technical sense, invisible to me, in which such terms can account for the book. But it seems to me, on the contrary, that calling it a satire is merely a way to avoid the disgusting truthfulness. There really is a system, and the system does behave more or less exactly in the ways Catch-22 describes. If the system seems crazy as described in this book, that is because it really is crazy. Exaggeration here does not provide the function of substituting a fantasy for reality. Rather, it serves the function of saturating with light the real and essential features of an existing and very nearly unendurable situation. Heller, in fact, seems to be very careful to avoid that exaggeration or that kind of grotesque, which would snap his story's connection with an objective, historical world, Milo's extravagant capitalism and extravagantly banal evil of the officer class are permissible because they refer to real social phenomena. The rebellion of the men, on the other hand, which in and of itself would even be much less extravagant, far more plausible psychologically, than Milo's bombing of his own base, is never allowed to happen. Until the very end of the book, that is, when Orr, that machine-age Sancho Panza, is found to have escaped to neutral Sweden, and Yossarian is about to join him, rebellion is limited to mutinous mutterings in dark corners or transient moments of individual refusal. This comes close to what I take to be the central moral dilemma -- and failure of Catch-22. This dilemma is concentrated in the little drama that takes place around the figure of Colonel Cathcart. Of a very bad lot, Cathcart is the worst. He combines all the standard virtues of his class: ruthlessness, stupidity, avarice, cowardice, and so on; Heller persuades us that Cathcart will indeed make general one day -- five-star, no doubt, But besides this, Cathcart is a centrally placed actor, someone whose decisions directly hit the lives of the men under his command. It is Cathcart who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly, Cathcart who gleefully anticipates casualties among his men on grounds that this will be proof to the higher-ups of his own greater dedication and bravery, Cathcart who consciously punishes the flyers by volunteering them for exceptionally dangerous missions, Cont. p 12 [advertisement, drawing of woman's head, upside down] "Things-Things-Things 123 S. Clinton Beads Buttons Jewels Ties Posters Dresses Adornments Things" [advertisement "LINO ART SUPPLY GROOVY."] Cont from p 9 One lieutenant (an officer and a gentleman, by act of Congress) even chose to remove one of his men from the second line of troops, take his place, open his fly, and urinate between the men in the front line. Several demonstrators were splattered, and several more were forced to remain sitting while the lieutenant's urine seeped down hill under them or give up their position to the soldiers. One voice from the crowd responded "This doesn't hurt me nearly as much as it does those poor soldiers who are being forced to adnit what an ass they're taking orders from". The March on Washington showed that the time has come to move from dissent to resistance. The march Saturday afternoon was dissent, and the lies in the press, the administration's reactions ('I will not be deterred by dissent'), and the public apathy, showed that it was, at best ineffectual, and at worst detrimental, in advancing the quest for peace. The happening at the Pentagon showed that Washington is not the place to resist. Our rhetoric has for some time revolved around the necessity for change from the bottom up and the futulity of asking concessions from the powers that be. The Pentagon bore this out. The place for resistance is here in Iowa City. We must stop the military colossus that is driving this country down a one way street to fascism by attacking it as individuals, where it affects our lives, i. e., the draft, the campus recruiters for the military and their industrial handmaidens, and the authoritarian structure of the University which trains people to be impersonal technicians, taking orders and asking no questions as long as the paycheck rolls in. Steve Morris [advertisement "BARELY CLASSIFIED ADS] Classified Ads are 3¢ a word, no minimum. Anything you have to give away free, however, we will advertise for free. To place an ad, call 683-2783, or write to MIDDLE EARTH c/o Dave Miller, Box 44A, RFD 1, Iowa City, Iowa 52240 FOR SALE: 1 dozen copper plates, 5 in.x7 in. 1 burin Acylic paints; new, unopened, whole set Sanford's Tempera water color: red, yellow. 22 sheets Vegetable Parchment Paper, 24 in.x 36 in. sheets Early nineteenth century book pages (many). Animal and insect engravings. Very nice. 18 in.x 24 in. colored construction paper. 3 lino blocks, 3 in.x 4 in. 1 set linoleum cutters 2 pen holders 2 large frames 16 in.x 22 in. drawing board 1 can Damar varnish 16 in.x 22 in. stretcher bars brushes BEST OFFER 338-6172 evenings Want to make tunes with weird things like Jimi Hendrix the Fresh Cream and call ourselves the Middle Earth?! I've got drums if you've got strings! Call 351-4067 or at the Airliner on weekends, or write to: The Middle Earth Conspiracy (soon to be), 248 Blacksprings Circle, Iowa City, Iowa BULK COPIES OF MIDDLE EARTH (25 copies or more) AVAILABLE FOR TEN CENTS each Call: Craig at 337-3791 Dave at 683-2783 Pete at 353-0466"
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11 Oglesby cont. from p. 5 springs from the fact that one group os men repeatedly exposes itself to death in the service of another group, whose aims are not only different but fiercely competitive. Over and over, in this novel which has been so highly praised by Time and Life and other leftwing journals, Heller drives home the point that the officers and the men might as well come from two different nations, that they are united only as the officers are successful in their deceit and deception. 'Almost hung,' wrote Thomas Nashe in the 16th century, 'for another man's rape - and we have in that phrase the crazy close calls and the crazy deaths which the crazy men of Catch-22 endure. Heller does not qualify this opposition so much as a comma's worth It is stark and unrelieved. Whenever we meet in this novel a recognizably sympathetic emotion - a moment of compassion or agony - we are among the slaves. Not that the men are sentimentalized: the there frailty enough in their ranks. But the officers, the rulers, are entirely despicable. Lacking even the bitter merits of their violence, they are not even bold or cunning. There is nothing new in the military slave's hatred of his military master; we have been hearing about that at least since The Naked and the Dead. But Norman Mailer at least endowed his General Cummins with a well-shaped and sometimes commanding intellect. In Mister Roberts, Thomas Heggin gave us a ship's captain who would be perfectly at home in Catch-22, but on the horizon of that world there were other ships and other captains whose goodness and legitimacy were in fact praised in the hero's death. From Here to Eternity has its share of officer lunatics, but their madness is never something to laugh at. In Catch-22, the officers are denied even the marginal virtues they might appear to possess. Culure, for example, that standard shield of class, is allowed to surface only in order to become more evidence of the officers' vanity and small-mindedness. When Nately is killed and Yossarian therefore refuses to fly any more missions, Colonel Korn days, 'Who does he think he is - Achilles?' Not a bad comparison, in fact: Korn knows something about Achilles besides the thing about the heel and applies what he knows justly, if contemptuously, to Yossarian's rebellion. But Heller destroys the effect by letting us in on a secret: 'Colonel Korn was pleased with the simile and filed a mental reminder to repeat it the next time he found himself in General Peckham's presence.' So instead of being impressed, we are amused: in his unrelieved vanity, and ambition, Korn has been caught in the act of fondling his knowledge. These officers, moreover, are not merely officers, for the reason mainly that this army is not merely an army. The army of Catch-22 is rather a little world which mirrors the larger, overarching world of which it is an offspring and a function. It is an image of America. The values in the name of which the officers direct their peculiar little wars of ambition and betrayal are identical with the values by which the naive maniac of capitalism Milo Minderbinder, is exonerated by an America he had seemed to betray. 'Won't you fight for your country?' Colonel Korn demanded of Yossarian, emulating Colonel Cathcart's harsh, self-righteous tone. 'Won't you give up your life for Colonel Cathcart and me?' Yossarian tensed with alert astonishment when he heard Colonel Korn's concluding words, 'What's that?' he exclaimed. 'What have you and Colonel Cathcart got to do with my country? You're not the same.' 'How can you separate us?' Colonel Korn inquired with ironical tranquility. 'That's right,' Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically. 'You're either for us or against us. There's no two ways about it.' 'I'm afraid he's got you,' added Colonel Korn. 'you're either for us or against your country. It's as simple as that.' 'Oh, no, Colonel. I don't buy that.' Colonel Korn was unruffled. 'Neither do I, frankly, but everyone else will. So there you are.' What is it exactly that everyone else is buying when he buys the inseparability of the country and the colonels? In the first place, he buys the ethic of mindless ambition and cut-throat deceit. 'Why does he, Cathcart, want to be a general?' asks Yossarian, and Korn answers: 'Why? For the same reason that I want to be a colonel. What else have we got to do? Everyone teaches us to aspire to higher things. A general is higher than a colonel, and a colonel is higher than a lieutenant colonel. So we're both aspiring.' And in the second place, he buys capitalism, a very pure, very unGalbraithian variety with all its old impulses toward monopoly and Mammonism wholly intact; along with the Korns, the Cathcarts, and the Peckhams, that is he buys Milo Minderminder. Not exactly an appealing purchase. It is no doubt because the purchas is in fact so terribly unappealing that Catch-22 has so often been taken as a satirical or even a farcical novel. Maybe there is some technical sense, invisible to me, in which such terms can account for the book. But it seems to me, on the contrary, that calling it a satire is merely a way to avoid the disgusting truthfulness. There really is a system, and the system does behave more or less exactly in the ways Catch-22 describes. If the system seems crazy as described in this book, that is because it really is crazy. Exaggeration here does not provide the function of substituting a fantasy for reality. Rather, it serves the function of saturating with light the real and essential features of an existing and very nearly unendurable situation. Heller, in fact, seems to be very careful to avoid that exaggeration or that kind of grotesque, which would snap his story's connection with an objective, historical world, Milo's extravagant capitalism and extravagantly banal evil of the officer class are permissible because they refer to real social phenomena. The rebellion of the men, on the other hand, which in and of itself would even be much less extravagant, far more plausible psychologically, than Milo's bombing of his own base, is never allowed to happen. Until the very end of the book, that is, when Orr, that machine-age Sancho Panza, is found to have escaped to neutral Sweden, and Yossarian is about to join him, rebellion is limited to mutinous mutterings in dark corners or transient moments of individual refusal. This comes close to what I take to be the central moral dilemma -- and failure of Catch-22. This dilemma is concentrated in the little drama that takes place around the figure of Colonel Cathcart. Of a very bad lot, Cathcart is the worst. He combines all the standard virtues of his class: ruthlessness, stupidity, avarice, cowardice, and so on; Heller persuades us that Cathcart will indeed make general one day -- five-star, no doubt, But besides this, Cathcart is a centrally placed actor, someone whose decisions directly hit the lives of the men under his command. It is Cathcart who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly, Cathcart who gleefully anticipates casualties among his men on grounds that this will be proof to the higher-ups of his own greater dedication and bravery, Cathcart who consciously punishes the flyers by volunteering them for exceptionally dangerous missions, Cont. p 12 [advertisement, drawing of woman's head, upside down] "Things-Things-Things 123 S. Clinton Beads Buttons Jewels Ties Posters Dresses Adornments Things" [advertisement "LINO ART SUPPLY GROOVY."] Cont from p 9 One lieutenant (an officer and a gentleman, by act of Congress) even chose to remove one of his men from the second line of troops, take his place, open his fly, and urinate between the men in the front line. Several demonstrators were splattered, and several more were forced to remain sitting while the lieutenant's urine seeped down hill under them or give up their position to the soldiers. One voice from the crowd responded "This doesn't hurt me nearly as much as it does those poor soldiers who are being forced to adnit what an ass they're taking orders from". The March on Washington showed that the time has come to move from dissent to resistance. The march Saturday afternoon was dissent, and the lies in the press, the administration's reactions ('I will not be deterred by dissent'), and the public apathy, showed that it was, at best ineffectual, and at worst detrimental, in advancing the quest for peace. The happening at the Pentagon showed that Washington is not the place to resist. Our rhetoric has for some time revolved around the necessity for change from the bottom up and the futulity of asking concessions from the powers that be. The Pentagon bore this out. The place for resistance is here in Iowa City. We must stop the military colossus that is driving this country down a one way street to fascism by attacking it as individuals, where it affects our lives, i. e., the draft, the campus recruiters for the military and their industrial handmaidens, and the authoritarian structure of the University which trains people to be impersonal technicians, taking orders and asking no questions as long as the paycheck rolls in. Steve Morris [advertisement "BARELY CLASSIFIED ADS] Classified Ads are 3¢ a word, no minimum. Anything you have to give away free, however, we will advertise for free. To place an ad, call 683-2783, or write to MIDDLE EARTH c/o Dave Miller, Box 44A, RFD 1, Iowa City, Iowa 52240 FOR SALE: 1 dozen copper plates, 5 in.x7 in. 1 burin Acylic paints; new, unopened, whole set Sanford's Tempera water color: red, yellow. 22 sheets Vegetable Parchment Paper, 24 in.x 36 in. sheets Early nineteenth century book pages (many). Animal and insect engravings. Very nice. 18 in.x 24 in. colored construction paper. 3 lino blocks, 3 in.x 4 in. 1 set linoleum cutters 2 pen holders 2 large frames 16 in.x 22 in. drawing board 1 can Damar varnish 16 in.x 22 in. stretcher bars brushes BEST OFFER 338-6172 evenings Want to make tunes with weird things like Jimi Hendrix the Fresh Cream and call ourselves the Middle Earth?! I've got drums if you've got strings! Call 351-4067 or at the Airliner on weekends, or write to: The Middle Earth Conspiracy (soon to be), 248 Blacksprings Circle, Iowa City, Iowa BULK COPIES OF MIDDLE EARTH (25 copies or more) AVAILABLE FOR TEN CENTS each Call: Craig at 337-3791 Dave at 683-2783 Pete at 353-0466"
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