Catch-22 remains my alltime favorite novel. It has shaped much of my political ideology. If you have not yet read it, I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone.
According to the story, anyone in the army who is crazy can be discharged from the army; all they have to do is ask. Ahh, but there's a catch:
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 were 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.
So now we find ourselves in a similar Catch-22 in the outrage over the trade that resulted in the release of Bowe Bergdahl. In the most egregious of the assertions, Bergdahl is a traitor because he deserted his military post and his fellow military personnel lost their lives as a direct result of his behavior.
However, the reality that belies this narrative, is that our American soldiers are constantly being asked to endure extreme hardships, whether they are being held capitve by our enemies or not. We're jetting them off to completely foreign lands, dealing with completely alien cultures and behaviors, cut off from anyone they were emotionally bound to before they entered the military. Asking for multiple tours of duty while providing meager financial recompense. And they have to put their lives on the line on a daily basis, or perhaps more terrifying, to possibly be permanently crippled. Under these circumstances, how can we look at anybody in our military as being of sound mind, let alone one that actually shows some humanity in the face of these adversities? Better yet, how can we consider ourselves or our leaders of sound mind to subject so many of our fellow citizens to these conditions, constantly, for such questionable objectives?
But if there is any absurdity that this situation highlights, it is the overall Catch-22 that has developed within the Republican Party. Simply put, it is this: anything that President Obama does, they must find a way to repudiate.
The catch is that sometimes he does things that the Republican Party itself has supported doing in the past, so then they have to either end up praising Obama for doing what they urged him to do, which makes them look bad in their supporters' eyes; or find excuses for why they don't like what Obama did even though they originally supported him doing it, which makes them look bad in everyone else's eyes.
I think this catch goes a long way toward explaining a lot of the GOP's recent histrionics. Why their grand efforts at rebranding themselves on race and gender were defeated so easily by a single picture of Michelle Obama holding up a hashtag. Perhaps even why they hang so desperately on to Benghazi, because it seems far more dangerous to have your policy actually openly taken seriously by the President. Of course, going against everything Obama supports is not exactly a new phenomenon out of the Republican Party. However, it certainly seems like recent developments have really highlighted the absurdity of this policy. It also indicates that the White House might possibly have picked up on all of this. I look forward to seeing what policies they can enact next that catches the Republicans in shadenfreudes of their own devising.
But at least with the Bowe Bergdahl controversy, they have earned my respectful whistle.
Wed Jun 04, 2014 at 11:32 AM PT:
How many Republican(Congressional) poutragers would come out of the woodworks if Obama declared himself The Decider?