What a glorious day this has been, a day like very few. A non-violent Egyptian revolution remakes the understanding of the world. Keith Olbermann hovers back into view, not only planning on coming to Al Gore & Friends' Current TV, but having lunch with Markos the day before the DK4 launch, possibly signaling the start of a fourth cable news network that will be what we had vainly half-hoped that MSNBC would be. And has been our last day on Daily Kos version 3-point-who-can-remember-how-many.
So much to write about, so little time. I suspect I have spent more hours on this web site than in any of the various beds I have slept in these past 5-1/2 years. It will be replaced by something different, something that we all hope works. How to leave, now that leaving is imminent?
I've mentioned frequently here that my favorite book is Joseph Heller's Catch-22. I spent the first half of my time on DK3 with a username taken from a character from that book. I'll return there for my last diary here.
I have, God help me, published 852 before in DK3 before this one (611 as Seneca Doane, 222 in my previous account, and 13 and 6 in two "campaign accounts.") I've also published 33 (8 from the current account, 25 from the resuscitated old one) on DK4), but I don't know if they'll continue to get counted in the statistics there. (I think that that link won't work until tomorrow.)
Probably my favorite diary of them all is this one, to which I keep referring people at various times -- far too often, I know -- not just because I like the message it offers to progressives but because it actually contains some novel literary criticism (which has not normally been my beat.) So I will return today for a few excerpts from Catch-22, including one that I'll bet that no one here would predict: about a pair of character that, when I've asked people about them, no one seems to remember.
This diary will, I promise, not be nearly as good as the one to which I linked above.
Catch-22 is a manic and hilarious novel, a mordant and disturbing novel, and occasionally a poignant one as well. I have three selections from it that I want to use as my swan song from this site. I shall work through the book backwards.
There are spoilers below, but don't let it stop you. If you haven't read the book, you won't even mind when you get to these sections, you'll be racing along at such a breathless pace.
1. The Hell of the Eternal City
The fulcrum of Catch-22 is the chapter "The Eternal City," that being Rome, where Yossarian encounters a simple, brainless, vicious, heinous murder of an innocent young girl -- which I've decided not to describe in detail because it grabs you by both ears and makes you look it in the face to the point where you could not focus on the rest of the diary -- that leads him on the steep slope towards the tragic (in my reading) or hopeful (as most read it) end of the book. (See that linked diary for the explanation.) The guilty party is Captain Aardvark, the kind of salt-of-the-earth guy who may be the quintessential Redstate American, although nothing before this point in the novel prepares you for what he does here, which is part of the point. Yossarian, the usually non-heroic hero, speaks first, as sirens approach the apartment where the soldiers took their R&R in Rome:
"They're coming to arrest you, Aarfy! You can't ... [do what you just did] and get away with it. ... Don't you see? Can't you understand?"
"Oh, no," Aarfy insisted with a lame laugh and a weak smile. "They're not coming to arrest me. Not good old Aarfy."
All at once he looked sick. He sank down on a chair in a tremendous stupor, his stumpy, lax hands quaking in his lap. Cars skidded to a stop outside. Spotlights hit the window immediately. Car doors slammed and police whistles screeched. Voices rose harshly. Aarfy was green. He kept shaking his head mechanically with a queer, numb smile and repeating in a weak, hollow, monotone that they were not coming for him, not for good old Aarfy, no siree, striving to convince himself that this was so even as heavy gootsteps raced up the stairs and pounded across the landing, even as fists beat on the door four times with a deafening, inexorable force. Then the door to the apartment flew open, and two large, tough, brawny M.P.s with icy eyes and firm, sinewy, unsmiling jaws entered quickly, strode across the room, and arrested Yossarian.
They arrested Yossarian for being in Rome without a pass.
They apologized to Aarfy for intruding and led Yossarian away....
2. The God I Don't Believe In
In a more comic mode (because at this point you probably need it) is the interchange on God between Yossarian and Mrs. Scheisskopf -- the wife of his commander with whom he trains stateside before deployment -- while they spend a Thanksgiving day during their affair, enjoying the holiday despite that she claims to be "just as good an atheist" as he is. Yossarian rails against God for His incessant blundering and sheer incompetence, needlessly creating pain (rather than a doorbell or neon light to indicate bodily problems), ending up with: "Why, no self-respecting businessman would have a bungler like Him even as a shipping clerk!"
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife had turned ashen in disbelief and was ogling him with alarm. "You'd better not talk that way about Him, honey," she warned him reprovingly in a low and hostile voice. "He might punish you."
"Isn't he punishing me enough?" Yossarian snorted resentfully. You know, we mustn't let Him get away with it. Oh, no, we certainly mustn't let Him get away scot free for all the sorrow He's caused us. Someday I'm going to make him pay. I know when. On the Judgment Day. Yes, that's the day I'll be close enough to reach out and grab that little yokel by His neck and --"
"Stop it! Stop it!" Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife screamed suddenly, and began beating him ineffectually about the head with both fists. "Stop it!"
Yossarian ducked behind his arm for protection while she slammed away at him in a feminine fury for a few seconds, and then he caught her determinedly by the wrists and forced her gently back down in the bed. "What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't believe in God."
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be."
3. The Colonel from Communications
Most people I know who have read Catch-22 will remember one or the other (and usually both) of the above incidents. But then there is the passage that, to me, is most unlike any other in the book, one that (except perhaps for a humorous bit in the middle) I've never seen or heard discussed, that always stops me cold whenever I re-read the book now and remember that in the 400 pages that follow I will not again see anything like it. It's in Chapter 1, almost at the end, between a funny bit and another funny bit about Yossarian and others in a military hospital in the Italian city of Pianosa where they are based, but it mostly the stuff of wonder:
In a bed in the small private section at the end of the ward, always working ceaselessly behind the green plyboard partition, was the solemn middle-aged colonel who was visited every day by a gentle, sweet-faced woman with curly ash-blond hair who was not a nurse and not a WAC and not a Red Cross girl but who nevertheless appeared faithfully at the hospital in Pianosa each afternoon wearing pretty pastel summer dresses that were very smart and white leather pumps with heels half high at the base of nylon seams that were inevitably straight. The colonel was in Communications, and he was kept busy day and night transmitting glutinous messages from the interior into square pads of gauze which he sealed meticulously and delivered to a covered white pail that stood on the night table beside his bed. The colonel was gorgeous. He had a cavernous mouth, cavernous cheeks, cavernous, sad, mildewed eyes. His face was the color of clouded silver. He coughed quietly, gingerly, and dabbed the pads slowly at his lips with a distaste that had become automatic.
The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he could feel. There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.
The colonel had really been investigated. There was not an organ of his body that had not been drugged and derogated, dusted and dredged, fingered and photographed, removed, plundered and replaced. Neat, slender and erect, the woman touched him often as she sat by his bedside and was the epitome of stately sorrow each time she smiled. The colonel was tall, thin and stooped. When he rose to walk, he bent forward even more, making a deep cavity of his body, and placed his feet down very carefully, moving ahead by inches from the knees down. There were violet pools under his eyes. The woman spoke softly, softer even than the colonel coughed, and none of the men in the ward ever heard her voice.
No one, after reading this raucous novel, seems to remember, a handful of pages into it, this quiet, dying colonel and the quiet woman who keeps him company in his dying days. You could excise them from the novel and never know that they were gone, never miss them. But you find them, you recognize them, and you cherish them. So has it been, here, for me. I'd never have missed it, but then I became part of it.
There are violet pools, now, under the eyes of Daily Kos 3. Eight hours left to live. I'll miss it.
We have given each other gifts on this site for years, every day, exposures to things we had not seen, perspectives we had not know. I come today with a small parting gift. If you have never read Catch-22, now perhaps you want to.
That will have to do. I didn't bring enough for everybody.