Catch-22: When Colonel Sheisskopf becomes President Trump
Catch -22 presciently exposes the insanity of the world where no sane man can help being insane. It depicts a war in which ignorant armies clash against enemies whom they have nothing and know little about. They fight, some for fun, some for glory and some only because they were shanghaied by faulty computer nodes. A pithy sentence captures the theme: “Men went mad and were rewarded with medals.”
No one watching the Israeli- US- Iran war can help wonder how Heller could foresee this in 1961. Catch-22 is set against the backdrop of World War-2, but the insanity it portrays belongs more fittingly to the one we are witnessing.
It starts from its very name. Is this a US-Israel- Iran war or an Israel-US-Iran War or a US-Israel-Gulf-Iran War? It may be any of these or more with some European countries being in a ‘to-be or not to be’ mode by allowing the US the (mis)use of their airbases strictly for defensive purposes in an offensive war.
The hostilities started less than a year after the June 2025 strike by Israel and the US, which they claimed had neutralized Iran’s nuclear facilities. This begs the question why another strike to neutralize the already neutralized program. Further Catch -22 twists occurred when the US told the UK, its old ally, and for many Americans the mother country, that it didn’t want them to join “wars that we have already won.” This snub carried the echo of Trump’s earlier statement that the allies had contributed little to the war efforts in Afghanistan, a statement he later revoked by remarking on the bravery of the British soldiers. The President similarly backtracked on the claim that he didn’t want anyone to join the war that was already won and appealed to his European allies and China to send warships to clear the strait of Hormuz.
This is Catch -22 through and through. In the novel, we have the protagonist Yossarian admitted to the military hospital in Pianosa. He suffered from a liver condition that ‘fell just short of being jaundice’ and puzzled the doctors. If it became jaundice they could treat it ; if it didn’t and went away they could discharge him. But it did neither, and rather like Trump’s mission has already been won without anybody’s help and needs everybody’s help to be won.
Of course, we cannot go the whole hog, and compare Yossarian to the president. In the novel, any pilot found insane has to be grounded and Yossarian acts crazy to avoid duty. He approaches Doc Daneeka, the army physician and claims himself to have gone nuts. But here lies another Catch-22. Doc Daneeka is Yossarian’s friend, least willing to help him, much like America’s NATO friends.
According to Doc Daneeka, if anyone claims to be crazy, he has to be sane. To complicate, he claims only crazy people will carry out the perilous missions and he cannot ground them unless they claim themselves to be crazy; but if anybody claims himself to be crazy it is a sign of sanity and he won’t ground them.
Trump’s case is different. In 2016, a battery of American psychologists and psychiatrists claimed that Trump was afflicted by “a dangerous mental illness” with symptoms like extreme narcissism, lack of empathy and grandiosity. In normal cases health professionals maintain confidentiality about their diagnosis. But leading psychiatrists like Brandy X. Lee and the psychologist John Gartner deemed they were ethically bound to warn about the president who constitutes a hazard to the US and the world. So, while we have the sane Yossarian acting crazy to evade homicidal missions in Heller, we have a president dubbed insane by the medical fraternity carrying out a genocidal war in the real world.
While the feigned insanity of Yossarian failed to garner the diagnostic approval, Trump’s problematic psychological disposition is being flagged by psychologists belonging to his close circle. Mary Trump, Trump’s niece and a psychologist, has on many occasions warned the world about her uncle’s psychopathy but Americans failed to pay heed to sane voices. In fact, the Trump family cabinet is full of skeletons with alcoholism, dementia, Alzheimer's and other ghosts inhabiting its cloisters.
We don’t know whether Netanyahu dragged Trump into this war or the other way? Or as Trump now suggests, was it Hegseth’s misadventure? Anyhow, the US finds itself like the monkey that has its tail caught in the carpenter’s wedge.
Iranians are a people with a fierce sense of dignity and seem to fear death only as much as Americans fear flu. They epitomize the Hemingwayian dictum: Man can be destroyed but not defeated. The US is discovering the hard way that there is no easy way out. Like Colonel Cathcart in Catch -22, Trump has been changing his goalpost from time to time. If the war started with the aim of neutralizing Iran’s nuclear programmes, Trump seems willing to pause, if Hormuz remains open to American vessels, i.e. the monkey just wants to get its tail off the wedge where its baboonery landed it.
But probably, we have it wrong. Trump might not be Catchcart, but the wily Milo Minderbender, the mess manager in Catch-22 who makes profit from war. The fact that war means unaudited profits for fat-cats is well illustrated. And who can say the businessman is not smelling blood?
Saramago said America is a great nation that had the misfortune of being ruled by petty leaders and Tocqueville said how the American way of life contributes to unending mental strain. Maybe Trump, the real-estate broker turned TV host turned politician, is a symptom of such a system. But, it is the world as a whole that is paying the penalty. In Catch -22, Sheisskopf (German for ‘shithead’), whose sole aim is winning parades achieves his rank thanks to incorrigible stupidity. The modern world ruled by the vagaries of algorithms has room for Sheisskopfs to parade their strength. Yossarian found a way to escape from Pianosa and reach neutral Sweden. Unfortunately, even such a possibility seems closed to us with what Carlson described as the Ship of Fools stuck in Hormuz blocking our cooking gas.
Umer O. Thasneem is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calicut.
