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We speak student!

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Catch-22

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a la Shmoop

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Let's talk about Milo.

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The chapters on his business

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are some of the most confusing and ludicrous in the book,

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which is saying something coming out of Catch-22.

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Milo was never supposed to be the mess officer.

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He ends up buying all sorts of exotic goods

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and red green bananas and selling strange products

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and chocolates and so on.

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What point is Heller trying to make with Milo's madness?

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Yeah, Milo -- This is where we get another

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thing coming into Catch-22

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and that's a critique of capitalism.

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Milo is the quintessential capitalist.

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And Heller is showing the collusion, the coming together,

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of capitalism, bureaucracy, and war.

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And Milo sells these, like you mentioned, chocolate-covered cotton balls.

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It's insane, but it also just really symbolizes

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the emptiness of what's going on

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and how everything is super illogical.

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But by bringing capitalism into it,

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we have even another layer of the satire.

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So it's not just a satire of war,

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like the bureaucracy in general.

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Heller is critiquing a very specific

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type of bureaucracy. He's critiquing capitalism

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as it plays into the war and American society in general.

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Got it. And this was a critique on the war itself

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or capitalism's role in it?

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Because you can look at World War II from a few perspectives.

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Certainly, financially. It's an ideologic war

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- as much as it is anything else. - Right,

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and it's about kind of dismissing morals in order to make a profit.

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That's what Heller sees it as

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is kind of forgetting about morals.

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And then this comes back to

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the officers in the air force who are like,

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"Oh, I don't care if a bunch of people are gonna die

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or if I'm doing the wrong thing,

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but if it's gonna get our ranks up

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or if it's gonna make America look good,

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then we'll just do it anyway."

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And he sees that same kind of thing happening with capitalism.

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Yeah and it's as if the money excuses you.

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A funny quote from Reid Hoffman,

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who last week just said that,

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"The problem is now that I'm a billionaire,

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everyone thinks all my ideas are good."

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And the reality is most of them aren't.

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He'd be the first one to tell you most of them aren't.

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Contemporaneously, Fiddler on the Roof has a great line here.

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Tevye says, "When you're rich,

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they think you really know what the hell you're talking about."

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The reality is probably the opposite.

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What point is Heller trying to make with Milo's madness?

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Why is Heller critiquing the capitalist mindset?

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[ electric car key beep ]

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