Yossarian Lives! in a tent with Occupy Wall Street

By now I had planned to have an update on Occupy Portland for this blog, but my schedule has kept me from making a full on-site inspection.

Occupy Portland has settled into a pair of city parks about seven blocks from my apartment -- as the crow flies; eight if you have to keep to the streets -- and I’ve strolled by a couple of times as well as monitored developments on the local news. But I haven't yet taken the time to wander through and talk to the protesters.

Occupy Portland is well into its second week. Occupy Wall Street has completed its fourth week. Worldwide “Occupy” protests have spread to 951 cities in 82 countries, according to Wikipedia …

… and this week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

So many commentators have been writing about Occupy Wall Street that I probably won’t be the first to note the wonderful coincidence between Yossarian’s 50th birthday and the Occupy movement’s message of anti corporate greed, anti endless, meaningless wars, and against the government’s abiding bias toward the rich.

But over the past year I’ve been working on a close study of Catch-22 for Book Drum, a British Web site for which I’ve previously profiled Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

So Yossarian, the hapless 28-year-old anti-hero of Heller’s 1961 classic, ostensibly about World War II but actually about so much more -- from McCarthyism and war profiteering in every armed conflict to the arbitrariness of power, government bureaucracy, and, yes, corporate greed -- has been much on my mind.

A bombardier aboard B-25 bombers that target Axis sites up and down the Italian boot, Yossarian gradually realizes that he is mortal, and that he is in mortal danger. He watches friends and fellow airmen disappear, witnesses one get accidentally chopped in half by the propeller of a plane flown by another (who promptly commits suicide), and most memorably, sees the guts of Snowden, another man on his plane, spill out of his body before he dies.

There’s a crazed capitalist in the story, Milo Minderbender, who wheels and deals in the hope of making huge profits, to the point of even contracting with the Germans to bomb his own air base.

All these events are couched in farcical terms: with exaggerations, satire, oxymorons, and ribald jokes. In other words, superficially the book appears too playful to be taken seriously. Which is not so different from some of the antics of the Occupy movement.

Every time Yossarian gets close to flying the total number of required bombing missions -- 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, and even 70 -- his commanding officer, Colonel Cathcart, raises them another notch.

Yossarian spends most of the novel trying everything he can think of to get out of flying those extra missions: pretending to have a debilitating disease, moving the battle lines on the tactical maps beyond where his squadron is supposed to fly, refusing to wear his uniform (that is, walking around the base naked), and acting crazy in the hope of being declared unfit to fly.

Yossarian was -- and is -- a Bartleby the Scrivener for the 20th and 21st centuries: a heroic refuser on an epic scale. He recognizes that the deck is stacked, that greater powers are either out to get him or pursuing their own agenda without caring whether he gets hurt or killed; and in refusing to play along, he serves as a model and inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The Occupy protesters are also fed up with:

·     corporations that pay billions to their CEOs while exporting American jobs to China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Pakistan, and Indonesia

·     banks that bend the rules for lending money for mortgages to keep their profit levels high, then foreclose on homeowners and throw them out, beg a bailout from the government, and then hike all their service fees to make up their losses even further

·     a government that pursues a ten-year war in Afghanistan and an eight-year war in Iraq for no particularly discernible reasons or clear goals

·     a government that appears to be led by the nose by the wealthiest 1 percent in the country, cutting their taxes and responding to their political agenda

Of course some members of the media and bewildered middle Americans have tried to portray Occupy Wall Street activists as dirty hippies, naïve youth, and socialists (as if that’s necessarily a bad thing), and that’s the sort of reception Yossarian got from some of his colleagues and superior officers.

But he escaped the system in the end. Maybe we can, too.