Catch 22

To write this missive I have just been banished to a corner of the library because of school boys playing computer war games. These cute boys are several colour shades from black to a murky brown. Upon reflection I cannot seriously doubt the power centres are conditioning us all for the next world war. The media regale us everywhere with images of delightful children, cuddly talking animals, hobbits, and a mad giant gorilla, all caught up in ‘good wars’ and just battles to the sounds of patasche Wagner.

Lord of the Rings and King Kong were made up in the 1930s and the Narnia story is first set in World War Two, but are we so sure they are real? The president of Iran is at once an evocation of King Kong and the Narnia White Witch.

In one of my bouts of picking up a stray book, I surprised myself by finishing Catch 22, first published in America in 1961. I soon became aware how how much since then we have changed and become more horned skin and resigned. The author Joseph Heller leaves no bones in his reminiscences of being a bombardier in the last years of World War Two.
I say ‘reminiscences’ rather than ‘fiction’ because the underlying truth is the lodestone of the book. The clearly surrealistic stuff is strained because it has to compete with the reality.

The contemporary reviews wrote of, to quote the dust jacket,

A savage indictment of twentieth century madness, and a desire of the ordinary man to survive it.

Reading that, I suddenly became aware such public language has, in the last few years, completely disappeared. I cannot say when that happened but it has gone. In its place we are bombarded with visual images and portentous voice-overs about ‘the good war’ and ‘The war on terrorism’. Dissenting voices sometimes raise a whisper, but they are banished to the usual left-wing suspects: Chomsky, Pilcher, Galloway, and a plaintive chorus of their fellow travellers.

‘The good war’ is always only the Second World War. I recall first hearing that term expressed by Bart in the Simpsons cartoon. Bart's words at the end of an episode were:
America has only fought one good war, World War Two.

I was astonished. What about the American War of Independence? What about the Civil War? The first founded the country, the second founded American political morality, once the light of the world.
But no-one seemed to publicly dissent and now ‘the good war’ is written into the English lexicon, both American and everywhere else.

I cannot seriously doubt again that quite consciously a global political morality tale is being written into our inner-most selves. World War Two is the ‘good’ war because it destroyed the greatest evil in history. An evil so monstrous that it cannot be calmly reflected upon. You notice they never now call that war as it was once universally proclaimed:

The war to give us freedom.

Today's terrorists are imbued with the same wickedness and therefore must be hunted down and destroyed.

In pathology in our private lives, crazy persons are persons who kill human beings for vengeance without a thought for the origins of their behaviour. Those boys with their computer games are harbingers of the future. But the makers of the New World Order have not thought out who will own them when they are men.