meditation XXX

Up, Down.

I started all this nonsense in September 2005 when I found myself in a well-paying job with a computer and nothing to do all day, if there had been anything to do it would have required access to the Internet so ... there I was, perfectly poised, a Brasilian colleague mentioned blogging, another, a few cubicles away had a blog going ... and it was done like dinner! Bob's 1965 editorial on wasted words notwithstanding

and as the years have gone by I have spent more and more time at it, an addict maybe? I don't think it is addiction really, just nothing else to do ... that and watching a tree:

so ... this is what I see when I look out of my window ...

I have actually been watching this particular tree (shades of Antoine de Saint Exupéry and Le Petit Prince / The Little Prince tending baobab trees & roses, & befriending foxes with his apprivoiser :-) since January when I moved in here, at first it seemed that there were two trees side-by-side, a sort of Priamus & Thisbe with the space between them elegantly arched, whorled - but on investigation it turned out to be one tree with two trunks separating about 25 feet up

inertia being what it is I didn't move on the idea until June, the camera is an Olympus Stylus 1010 which is obviously too complicated for me since I cannot even get the auto-focus to work, if you are offered one - just say 'no', I have posted it previously twice, on June 5th & June 21st,

there was a dramatic storm in August and I thought of trying to capture the tossing twisting branches in a video, but the camera and I were not up to it, nor have I found out what species it is, I have not gone and collected a leaf or two from the sidewalk next to it ... some kind of maple I imagine but I don't even know if that is reasonable

a-and the antecedents grow more-and-more oblique, the illustration for Rudyard Kipling's The Cat Who Walked By Himself, and two phrases from two verses of Bob Dylan's Dirge ...

Este é o desenho do Gato que Andava Sozinho, a andar com a sua selvagem solidão pelos Bosques Humidos e Selvagens e a dar com a sua cauda selvagem. Não há mais nada no desenho, excepto alguns cogumelos venenosos. Tinham de crescer all, porque os bosques eram tão humidos. A coisa papuda no ramo mais baixo nao é um passaro. É musgo que cresceu ali, porque os Bosques Selvagens eram tão húmidos.

Por baixo do desenho verdadeiro está um desenho da Caverna acolhedora para que o Homem e a Mulher foram depois de vir o Bebé. Era a sua Caverna de Verao, e plantaram trigo em frente dela. O Homem está a andar no Cavalo para encontrar a Vaca para a trazer de volta à Caverna para ser mungida. Tem a mão levantada para chamar o Cão, que nadou para o outro lado do rio, à procura de coelhos.


Heard your songs of freedom and man forever stripped,
Acting out his folly while his back is being whipped.
Like a slave in orbit, he's beaten 'til he's tame,
All for a moment's glory and it's a dirty, rotten shame.

So sing your praise of progress and of the doom machine,
The naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen.
Lady Luck, who shines on me, will tell you where I'm at,
I hate myself for lovin' you, but I should get over that.



hope springs eternal ... just exactly two weeks ago, on Friday October 23, we had Barack Obama Challenging Americans to Lead the Global Economy in Clean Energy, and pointing at the 'cynical deniers', and today Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd excoriating them in a speech to the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, though there is not a video of his performance to be seen (that I can find at least), ok, here it is: Kevin Rudd on Slow TV, also pictured is Australia's Environment Minister Penny Wong, God bless 'em both.

I grew up on Walt Disney, we got our first TV set sometime in the early 50s and his program was almost never missed, and more than ten years later I was still watching it, he died in 1966, about the time that Disney World opened in Florida, I guess I was too old for it by then and I never understood DisneyLand's attraction, and I remember that the show continuing after his death was a question for me too, naive innocent child that I was ... I didn't know then that he had been one of Senator Joseph McCarthy's star boys, and it was much later on that I finally had a clue from Simon & Garfunkel:

Kodachrome, give us those nice bright colours
Give us the greens of summers
Make you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photographs
Oh mama don't take my Kodachrome away.

by the time I was reading stories to my children anything that showed up with the Disney logo was soon tossed in the bin, no ideology involved just didn't like it, and there were other stories that we did like: The Butterfly That Stamped & Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like & The Snow Queen f'rinstance, to mention but a few

if I had to take Disney's (essentially daemonic) image and turn it inside out, transform it into something fit to splice into a fecund myth - well, it would be this image of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in the dawn with a Greenpeace banner flying from it :-)

round again to Frye's, "that these imbecile words are euphemisms for manic-depressive highs and lows, and that anyone who struggles for sanity avoids both," a-and maybe threading the Walt Disney needle was just shit-house luck (if this is sanity that is :-)

Abang Othow, also connected with Australia, has co-written a book, The long road to safety: Abang Othow's story with Elizabeth Corfe & Timothy Ide, aimed at youngsters, comparable to Kagiso Lesego Molope's The Mending Season, mentioned below, in that regard maybe - if I could ever get a copy of either one maybe I could see more clearly!

part of it is available at Google Books, and with a few more pictures:


Charles Schulz disliked the Pig-Pen character apparently.

For Major Major, it meant the end of the game. His face flushed with discomfort, and he was rooted to the spot in disbelief as the rain clouds gathered above him again.
     Joseph Heller, Catch-22.

one of Major Major's shortcomings was undoubtedly that he told the truth when asked, as Bob says, "the naked truth is still taboo wherever it can be seen," and I guess some people have learned and some like myself are still learning just how this works itself out on the ground, there is a connection with 'stream of consciousness' in literature as it was presented to us in the 60s via James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and later for a few there was Finnegan's Wake, but I never considered until just now that the words as they arrived on the page were anything but spontaneous, a necessary disconnect that we were not told about :-)

and mixed together with imprecise notions of Blake's 'Christian forbearance' ... maybe that was how it became such a toxic psychological stew ...

and too, there is the element of time, lag-time, inertia, social change takes generations to accomplish and that is a good thing probably since it comprises events which happen in the dark uncharted zones, where reason holds no sway and chaos reigns ...

Sid Ryan and his cronies in The United Church of k-k-Canada teamed up a while ago on their embargo of Israel, imperfect comparisons with South Africa's apartheid no doubt contributing to their nonsense, I have posted here on the subject before but I can't be bothered just now summarizing ... and anyway the issue is so complex and complicated, threads like the Goldstone Report from the so called United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) which just lead everywhere, but in my simple brain the discovery of the Francop fiasco (or should it be 'imbroglio'?), a German boat registered in Antigua and carrying arms from Iran to Syria, destined for Hezbollah/Hizbollah in Lebanon, well, in my simple brain this simplifies the thing somewhat ... will the UCC nitwits eventually rationalize the Francop into their warped ideological fabric? stupid question ...

but there is a personal angle here too - looking for some society I went along to a meeting of Maude Barlow's Council of Canadians a few months ago, knowing beforehand that she is tight with Sid Ryan but hoping against hope that it was not that tight maybe, and discovered a Brit who went terrier-rabid at any disrespect to 'our friend Sid' ... oh my ... and again, looking for someplace to worship, met a gent from Bathurst United, which turns out to be the nexus or plexus or whatever you want to call it of the UCC adherents to the gospel according to Sid Ryan ... so yeah, I do identify to a degree with Joe Btfsplk & Pig-Pen & Major Major Major Major

and I guess this blogging nonsense at least helps to pass the time ...

I notice that Greenpeace have discovered 'who is to blame' - it is the United States natch, so they dress up a statue of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona, staple twenty pounds of headlines to its chest and carry on ... I was talking to my daughter on the phone the other day and mentioned that I was more-or-less supporting Greenpeace since they seemed to be just about the only ones doing anything, she groaned ...

I groan too, when I hear their local chief-ette, Kim Fry (?) speaking at Queen's Park on the 24th of October and she goes on bragging about getting arrested, counting the number of arrests, itemizing & detailing the arrests, cutting notches like some TV gunslinger ... not that getting arrested is a bad thing, or even undesirable, just that it is not the point is it? not the be-all and end-all, not the objective of the action eh? and now this 'the US is to blame' bullshit ... what ever happened to Pogo consciousness? or maybe this is all just a play on words? is that it?

or "be a nice fellow?" as I descend into a kind of continual groaning Tourette's (which they say is inherited) comprising mostly "Fucking Bitch! Cunt! Fucking Shit! Useless! You are Useless! Good for Fucking Nothing!" which is maybe not that healthy ... or maybe it is? this from someone who really does not understand even the differences between bathos: in rhetoric, a ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech, anticlimax, and pathos: that quality in speech, writing, music, or artistic representation (or transferred sense in events, circumstances, persons, etc.) which excites a feeling of pity or sadness, the power of stirring tender or melancholy emotion, and pathetic fallacy: the attribution of human response or emotion to inanimate nature,

"put him in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been the champion of the world."

thinking of Major Major Major Major, amd now, getting along, Milo the Mayor where the dominant quality is selfishness, makes me angry ... keeping in mind that I have read this Catch-22 a number of times before and I know how it ends, which ending never satisfied me

anger? aha! and up pops Paul Krugman, saying Paranoia Strikes Deep, quoting Buffalo Springfield, and referring to Richard Hofstadter on The Paranoid Style in American Politics from waaaaay back in 1964

anger, it was a virtue to us in the 60s, there was a film The Last Angry Man, net tells me it was in 1959 ... don't remember seeing it but it was a presence somehow ... (first movie I ever saw was Phantom from Space in 1953 which frightened me so badly that I made my father take me out of the theatre, he was chuffed, I think it was a long time before I saw another ... maybe it was the late 50s then when we finally got our TV (?))

so ... it has taken a long time for me to even begin to understand why anger is one of the seven deadly sins ... anger & paranoia are linked ... this is sketchy ... also Frye's comment on Pynchon's creative use of paranoia ... very sketchy indeed ...

walked past the tree this morning, some kind of alder (?), 'deltoid' leaves ... there is another name which is on the tip of my tongue ...


Appendices:
1. Prime Minister Address to the Lowy Institute, Kevin Rudd, 6 Nov. 2009.
     1a. Kevin Rudd on Slow TV.
2-1. Catch-22, nine. MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR.
2-2. Catch-22, twenty-two. MILO THE MAYOR.
3. Israelis 'seize Iran arms ship', BBC, 4 Nov. 2009.
4-1. Paranoia Strikes Deep, Paul Krugman, Nov. 9 2009.
4-2. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter, 1964.


***************************************************************************
Prime Minister Address to the Lowy Institute, Kevin Rudd, 6 Nov. 2009.

I acknowledge the First Australians on whose land we meet, and whose cultures we celebrate as among the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

Thank you Michael and thanks to all the supporters of the Lowy Institute for joining us today.

As you know, I attended the Major Economies Forum in L'Aquila in July; I was recently at the G20 Leaders meeting in Pittsburgh; and next week I will travel to the APEC Leaders meeting in Singapore.

At each of these meetings, and in constant bilateral conversations being conducted by national leaders around the world, the common thematic is: What does our nation, what does our region and what does the world do to respond to climate change, the greatest long term threat to us all?

As APEC leaders gather in Singapore next week, this is a critical question.

The Asia Pacific region will play the key role in leading the world into economic recovery. Similarly, our region must play a central role if we are to forge a global consensus on tackling climate change.

This afternoon I want to set out the views that I will be reflecting to other world leaders in the days and weeks ahead, in bilateral conversations and in forums such as APEC, leading up to the Copenhagen summit.

Australia and the world today stand at critical junctures in our national and global strategies to tackle climate change.

It is around 20 days until the Senate votes on the Australian Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

20 days until the most important vote on our national strategy to tackle climate change.

20 days away from the vote on the Government's cap and trade emissions trading system which both sides of politics have recognised as the lowest cost way to tackle climate change.

And we are just 31 days away from the Copenhagen Conference of Parties - an historic moment to forge a global deal to put a global price on carbon.

Today we are approaching the crossroads. Both these policies are reaching crunch time.

When you strip away all the political rhetoric, all the political excuses, there are two stark choices - action or inaction. The resolve of the Australian Government is clear - we choose action, and we do so because Australia's fundamental economic and environmental interests lie in action.

Action now. Not action delayed.

As one of the hottest and driest continents on earth, Australia's environment and economy will be among the hardest and fastest hit by climate change if we do not act now. The scientific evidence from the CSIRO and other expert bodies have outlined the implications for Australia, in the absence of national and global action on climate change:

* Temperatures in Australia rising by around five degrees by the end of the century.
* By 2070, up to 40 per cent more drought months are projected in eastern Australia and up to 80 per cent more in south-western Australia.
* A fall in irrigated agricultural production in the Murray Darling Basin of over 90 per cent by 2100.
* Storm surges and rising sea levels - putting at risk over 700,000 homes and businesses around our coastlines, with insurance companies warning that preliminary estimates of the value of property in Australia exposed to the risk of land being inundated or eroded by rising sea levels range from $50 billion to $150 billion.
* Our Gross National Product dropping by nearly two and a half per cent through the course of this century from the devastation climate change would wreak on our infrastructure alone.

The Government took a plan to tackle climate change to the last election, to tackle the risks climate change poses to our planet, and especially to the health, lifestyle and livelihoods of our children.

That plan included two fundamental parts:

* First, a domestic plan of action to reduce Australia's carbon pollution, including:

o Expanding the Renewable Energy Target to 20 per cent by 2020 (and subsequently directly investing over $2 billion in renewable energy, including investment in large scale solar generating capacity that will be three times larger than the world's current largest project).
o A national energy efficiency strategy to reduce the energy that we can consume, and undertaking the largest investment in energy efficiency ever seen in this country.
o A Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme that will increase the cost of carbon over time and facilitate a transition to a low carbon pollution economy.

* The second part of our strategy is participation in global action to tackle climate change, including:

o ratifying the Kyoto Protocol;
o participating in global technology transfers - including Australian leadership in a global coalition to develop carbon capture and storage through the Australia-initiated Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute; and
o strong engagement towards a new post-Kyoto global agreement.

This was the platform we took to the Australian people at the election. This is the program of action we have been prosecuting over the past two years. Yet the cornerstone of this program of action, the CPRS, still lies stymied in the Senate.

Australia has certainly not been alone in our endeavours to tackle global climate change. At the same time, around the world we have seen nations of every political stripe take concrete action to work towards legislation in this critical area - actions which have been slowly building towards coordinated international action to tackle climate change. And most nations have been engaged in the multilateral process - through the Bali Roadmap two years ago, through the 14th Conference of the Parties in Poznan, Poland last year, and the intensifying global negotiations leading up to the 15th Conference of Parties in Copenhagen this year.

Today, the culmination of this domestic and global action is in sight. Much progress has been made, but, the truth is that there is still a long way to go. In fact, the hardest part of our journey is ahead of us over the next 31 days.

This is a profoundly important time for our nation, for our world and for our planet.

In Australia, we must pass our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme - to deliver certainty for business at home and to play our part abroad in any global agreement to bring greenhouse gases down.

President Obama in the United States is also working hard so that he can take strong commitments to Copenhagen. And let us never forget that in the US, as in Australia, under both our respective previous governments, zero action was taken on bringing in cap and trade schemes meaning that the governments that replaced them began with a zero start.

Other countries are striving to build domestic political momentum in their own countries to take strong commitments into the global deal.

The challenge we face, and others around the world face, is to build momentum and overcome domestic political constraints.

The truth is this is hard, because the climate change skeptics, the climate change deniers, the opponents of climate change action are active in every country.

They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests.

Powerful enough to so far block domestic legislation in Australia, powerful enough to so far slow down the passage of legislation through the US Congress. And ultimately - by limiting the ambition of national climate change commitments - they are powerful enough to threaten a deal on global climate change both in Copenhagen and beyond.

The opponents of action on climate change fall into one of three categories:

* First, the climate science deniers.
* Second, those that pay lip service to the science and the need to act on climate change but oppose every practicable mechanism being proposed to bring about that action.
* Third, those in each country that believe their country should wait for others to act first.

Together, these groups, alive in every major country including Australia, constitute a powerful global force for inaction, and they are particularly entrenched in a range of conservative parties around the world.

As we approach Copenhagen, these three groups of climate skeptics are quite literally holding the world to ransom, provoking fear campaigns in every country they can, blocking or delaying domestic legislation in every country they can, with the objective of slowing and if possible destroying the momentum towards a global deal on climate change.

As we approach the Copenhagen conference these groups of climate change deniers face a moment of truth, and the truth is this: we will need to work much harder to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because these advocates of inaction are holding back domestic commitments, and are in turn holding back global commitments on climate change.

It is time to be totally blunt about the agenda of the climate change skeptics in all their colours - some more sophisticated than others.

It is to destroy the CPRS at home, and it is to destroy agreed global action on climate change abroad, and our children's fate - and our grandchildren's fate - will lie entirely with them.

It's time to remove any polite veneer from this debate. The stakes are that high.

The first category of those opposed to action is the vocal group of conservatives who do not accept the scientific consensus. This group believes the science is inconclusive and does not provide an evidentiary basis for anthropogenic climate change.

In Australia, before the 2007 election, this group was thought to be relatively small. There appeared - for a time - to be bipartisan consensus on the need for action on climate change. In recent times, this bipartisan support has frayed.

As one Liberal Member of Parliament said to Phil Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald last year: "[at the last election we supported an ETS because] we were staring at an electoral abyss. We had to pretend we cared." (SMH, 28 JULY 2008)

More recently that pretence has been increasingly cast aside. Would-be Liberal leader Tony Abbott said in July this year that "the science ... is contentious to say the least". (27 July 2009)

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi said: "I remain unconvinced about the need for an ETS given that carbon dioxide is vital for life on earth".

Liberal Senator Alan Eggleston said: "Levels of carbon dioxide have risen in the world, but whether or not this is the sole cause or just a contributor to climate change is, I think, unanswered." (11 AUGUST 2009)

Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin said this year: "CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant... This whole extraordinary scheme is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming." (11 AUGUST 2009)

Alternative Liberal leader Joe Hockey - who knows better - has been drawn into the same sort of doublespeak, remarking on the Today Show in August: "Look, climate change is real Karl, you know whether it is made by human beings or not that is open to dispute." (12 AUGUST 2009)

Even the leader of the Opposition, once Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, has flirted with this doublespeak, telling Alan Jones on 2GB: "I think most people have at least some doubts about the science." (19 JUNE 2009)

The tentacles of the climate change skeptics reach deep into the ranks of the Liberal Party, and once you add the National Party it's plan the skeptics and the deniers are a major force.

Climate sceptics are also a powerful political lobby in the United States.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steel said on 6 March 2009: "We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process."

House Minority Leader John Boehner said on April 19 2009: "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide."

Republican Congressman John Shimkus said on 25 March 2009: "If we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?"

The legion of climate change skeptics are active across the world, and they happily play with our children's future.

The clock is ticking for the planet, but the climate change skeptics simply do not care. The vested interests at work are simply too great.

It's been more than 30 years since the first World Climate Conference called on governments to guard against potential climate hazards.

It's been 20 years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed and produced its first report.

17 years ago, in 1992, the international community acknowledged the importance of tackling climate change at the Rio Earth Summit and created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

And the most recent IPCC scientific conclusion in 2007 was that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and the "increase in global average temperatures since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."

This is the conclusion of 4,000 scientists appointed by governments from virtually every country in the world, and the term "very likely" is defined in the scientific conclusion of this report as being 90 per cent probable.

Attempts by politicians in this country and others to present what is an overwhelming global scientific consensus as little more than an unfolding debate, with two sides evenly represented in a legitimate scientific argument, are nothing short of intellectually dishonest. They are a political attempt to subvert what is now a longstanding scientific consensus, an attempt to twist the agreed science in the direction of a predetermined political agenda to kill climate change action.

It reminds me of the efforts of the smoking lobby decades ago as they tried for years to politically subvert by so-called scientific means that there was any link between smoking and lung cancer.

Put more simply: these climate change sceptics around the world would be laughable if they were not so politically powerful - particularly in the ranks of conservative parties.

The second group of do-nothing climate change skeptics are those who purport to accept the scientific consensus, but in the next breath are unwilling to support any of the practicable plans of action that would actually do something about climate change. This group plays lip service to the climate change science but when push comes to shove refuse to support climate change action. In Australia, these naysayers have successfully blocked the development of an emissions trading scheme for more than a decade.

After 12 years of inaction under the previous government, this government has worked to build a national consensus around our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. We took the concept to the people at the 2007 election, and since then we have methodically, clearly and comprehensively worked towards passage of our scheme.

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper was released on 16 June 2008.

The Garnaut Climate Change Review was released on 30 September 2008.

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme White Paper was released on 15 December 2008.

The Draft Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation was released in March.

There have been numerous Senate Inquiries.

There have also been numerous industry consultations.

As of May 2009, the Government had built wide support for action on climate through a carbon pollution reduction scheme.

There was broad business, environmental and community support from:

* The Business Council of Australia
* The Australian Industry group
* The Climate Institute
* The Australian Conservation Foundation
* The World Wildlife Fund
* The Australian Council of Social Services representing lower income Australians.

Today, after so many reports, reviews, consultations, not to mention the small matter of an election - the overwhelming need for Australia to tackle the great challenge of our generation is being frustrated by the do-nothing climate change skeptics.

As recently as last year, the Leader of the Opposition was emphatic in his support for an emissions trading scheme. He said it was the "central mechanism" in the fight against climate change.

Speaking at the National Press Club in May last year, he stated: "The Emissions Trading Scheme is the central mechanism to decarbonise our economy." (21 May 2008)

A few days later, he said: "The biggest element in the fight against climate change has to be the emissions-trading scheme." (HANSARD - 26 MAY 2008)

But still today, after so many reports and consultations, the Liberal Party, the National Party and other opponents of action raise objections to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Their objections fall into three categories:

* Some argue that the cost is too high in terms of its impact on our economy.
* Others argue that the cost is too high in terms of its impact on households.
* And others object to the system of global emissions trading because they believe it will unjustifiably transfer money and power from rich countries to poor countries.

Let us take each of these in turn.

First is the cost to our economy and jobs.

This has been a constant theme of the Liberal and National Parties' attacks on the CPRS. Mr Turnbull said the CPRS "is guaranteed to slow our economic recovery, cost us jobs."

And the de facto leader of the National Party, Barnaby Joyce, refers to the emissions trading scheme as the "employment termination scheme" - whereas I thought any self-respecting National Party leader would be out there standing up for farmers facing 40 to 80 per cent more drought in the future, rather than betraying them.

The facts about the impact of unmitigated climate change on the one hand and the CPRS on the other tell a very different story, but that eternal motto of the Liberal and National Parties is never let the facts stand in the road of a good fear campaign - whether it's debt, border security or climate change.

Here are the facts.

Treasury modelling done in 2008 demonstrates Australia can continue to achieve strong trend economic growth while making significant cuts in emissions through the CPRS. Treasury modelling also demonstrates that all major employment sectors grow over the years to 2020 - substantially increasing employment from today's levels. Treasury modelling also projects that clean industries will create sustainable jobs of the future - in fact by 2050 the renewable electricity sector will be 30 times larger than it is today.

Another element of the Liberal and National fear campaign about the design of the CPRS is that it will impose unmanageable cost on households.

Again, Senator Joyce - fearmonger in chief on climate change, he who therefore betrays the real interests of Australian farmers - puts the position of the Liberal and National parties as follows: "If you live in a cave with a candle you would probably be OK, but if your house is wired up for power then every electrical appliance will be attached to a power generator which in all likelihood will pay a tax and that tax will be passed on to you, the consumer." (Joyce - 27 JULY 2009)

Again, the facts on the true household costs and impacts of the CPRS tell a different story. Treasury modelling again demonstrates that the price impact of the CPRS is modest. The CPRS is expected to raise household prices by 0.4 per cent in 2011-12 and 0.8 per cent in 2012-13, and the government has provided household compensation to help assist with these modest cost rises.

Pensioners, seniors, carers and people with disability and low-income households will receive additional support to fully meet the expected overall increase in the cost of living flowing from the scheme. Middle-income households will also receive additional support to help meet the expected overall increase in the cost of living flowing from the scheme.

A third argument from those who quibble with the design of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is that the international design aspects of the scheme are flawed.

Lord Christopher Monckton - a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher - was quoted this week in the Australian press by Janet Albrechtsen. Lord Monckton describes the potential Copenhagen agreement as a plan to set up a transnational "government" on a scale the world has never before seen. Enter the "world government" conspiracy theorists.

Lord Monckton also publicly warned Americans that "in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever."

Janet Albrechtsen, in her understated neo-conservative way, refers to the potential Copenhagen agreement as a UN "power grab". This gaggle of world government conspiracy theorists are so far out there on the far right, that they rub up next to the global anarchists of the far left.

Those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil.

Those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure.

Those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem.

And that uncoordinated national actions will fix the problem.

Without answering the basic logical question of how can we deal with an existential challenge for the whole planet which lies beyond the capacity of any individual national action to address.

The climate change deniers now form the comfortable bedfellows of the global conspiracy theorists - in total bald-faced denial of global scientific, economic and environmental reality. These arguments - thinly veiled attempts to create a new climate change global conspiracy theory - are now being used in Australia.

Like the arguments from climate change deniers, these arguments have zero basis in evidence.

Where is their equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government of the industry and employment impacts of climate change?

Where is their equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government on the cost impacts for households from the CPRS - and on the adequacy of the compensation arrangements put in place by the Government in our White Paper?

The answer once again is there is none.

Where is the evidence basis offered by the new league of world government conspiracy theorists that climate change can be effectively dealt with by market means or by uncoordinated national means?

Answer - there is none.

The truth is that the do-nothing climate change skeptics offer no alternative official body of evidence from any credible government in the world.

Absolutely none. The truth is they offer zero evidence.

Instead they offer maximum fear, the universal conservative stock in trade.

And by doing so, these do-nothing climate change skeptics are prepared to destroy our children's future.

The third group of climate deniers are those who pretend to accept the science but then urge delay because they don't want their country to be the first to act.

In Australia there was once a political consensus resisting this parochial view.

The Shergold Report commissioned by John Howard and written by the head of the Prime Minister's department recommended that Australia should not wait for the rest of the world to act: "... waiting until a truly global response emerges before imposing an emissions cap will place costs on Australia by increasing business uncertainty and delaying or losing investment." (Report of the Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading, June 2007, p.6)

The current Leader of the Opposition also stated that a domestic ETS would help in international negotiations too: "... our first hand experience in implementing ... an emissions trading system would be of considerable assistance in our international discussions and negotiation aimed at achieving an effective global agreement." (Turnbull - SMH Opinion Piece - 9 July 2008)

Then the Leader of the Opposition stated he no longer supported domestic action before Copenhagen: "I would not find, I would not support finalising the design this year. Even the best designed scheme in theory needs to have the input of the knowledge of what happens at Copenhagen and what the Americans will do." (AM - 16 MARCH 2009)

Seven times the Liberals and Nationals have promised to make a decision on their policy on climate change - and seven times they have delayed.

1. In December 2007 they said wait for Garnaut.
2. In September 2008 they said wait for Treasury modelling.
3. In September 2008 they said wait for the White Paper.
4. In December 2008 they said wait until the Pearce Report.
5. In April 2009 they said wait for the Senate Inquiry.
6. In May 2009 they said wait for the Productivity Commission - forgetting that the Productivity Commission already made a submission on emissions trading to the Howard Government's Shergold Report.
7. Now the Liberals and National have said wait for Copenhagen and for President Obama's scheme.

It is an endless cycle of delay - and I am sure that with December almost upon us, the eighth excuse cannot be far away - which will be to wait until the next year or the year after until all the rest of the world has acted at which time Australia will act.

What absolute political cowardice. What an absolute failure of leadership. What an absolute failure of logic. The inescapable logic of this approach is that if every nation makes the decision not to act until others have done so, then no nation will ever act.

The immediate and inevitable consequence of this logic - if echoed in other countries - is that there will be no global deal as each nation says to its domestic constituencies that they cannot act because others have not acted.

The result is a negotiating stalemate. A permanent standoff.

And this of course is the consistent ambition of all three groups of do-nothing climate change deniers.

As we approach Copenhagen, it becomes clearer that the domestic political pressure produced by the climate change skeptics now has profound global consequences by reducing the momentum towards an ambitious global deal. The argument that we must not act until others do is an argument that has been used by political cowards since time immemorial - both of the left and the right.

To take just one example, it has been used as an argument to retain protectionism, stifling economic growth and global competition, and preventing the spread of global prosperity.

As many have noted, it is the international political version of the prisoner's dilemma. If we allow our actions to be dictated by what we falsely conclude to be in our narrow self-interest, then we harm not just others but ourselves as well because climate change inaction harms us as well.

Climate change deniers are small in number, but they are too dangerous to be ignored. They are well resourced and well represented by political conservatives in many, many countries.

And the danger they pose is this - by collapsing political momentum towards national and global action on climate change, they collapse global political will to act at all. They are the stick that gets stuck in the wheel, that despite its size may yet bring the train to a complete stop.

And that is what they want, because they are driven by a narrowly defined self interest of the present and are utterly contemptuous towards our children's interest in the future.

This brigade of do-nothing climate change skeptics are dangerous because if they succeed, then it is all of us who will suffer. Our children. And our grandchildren. If we fail, then it will be a failure that will echo through future generations.

The consequences for Australia of failing to act domestically and internationally on climate change are severe. We know from formal global and national economic modelling that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting. Treasury modelling from October 2008 shows that economies that defer action on climate change face long-term costs around 15 per cent higher than those that take action now.

The sooner we act, the better placed our companies will be to benefit from new emerging global markets, and to benefit from the economic gains from improved efficiency. Moving to a low pollution economy will require significant investment in renewable energy, carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency and other low emissions technologies.

We need to start giving the signal to investors that they need to factor the price of carbon into their decisions to make the investments we need. Importantly, business needs certainty to make these investments.

As Greig Gailey, former President of the Business Council of Australia said: "Only business can make the many investments needed to transition Australia to a low carbon economy. To do this business needs certainty."

Without passage of the CPRS there will be no certainty for business. That is why business groups like the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group want to see the major parties come together and vote on the CPRS this year.

Heather Ridout, Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group said: "... many of our members are telling us that they are holding off making investments until there is a greater degree of clarity around domestic climate change legislation." (ADECCO Group Australia Breakfast - 15 October 2009)

Russell Caplan, Chairman of Shell Australia, said: "... we believe a far greater risk is that Australia misses the opportunity to put a policy framework in place to deal with this issue. This would create a climate of continuing uncertainty for industry and potentially delay the massive investments required." (BRW - 6 August 2009)

These are the implications for Australia. These are the political challenges we now face both at home and abroad. But my unequivocal message to the nation today is that this nation Australia will not be deterred. Our course is clear. That is why this government will press forward with our plan to tackle climate change domestically and globally. Domestically we will press forward with the passage of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. It will be voted on in the House in the week beginning Monday November 16. It will be introduced into the Senate immediately after the vote in the House. It will then be voted on in the Senate in the week beginning 23 November.

We welcome the Opposition's recent cooperation and I'm pleased to hear from Minister Wong that negotiations are proceeding in good faith. I'd like to personally commend the Member for Groome for his genuine efforts to engage with the Government in good faith to reach a reasonable outcome with the Government that will finally deliver action on Climate Change.

We are of course concerned by the comments of the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate that "even if the government accepts all our amendments, we may well still vote against the bill." (NICK MINCHIN- 2UE- 30 OCTOBER 2009)

The do-nothing climate change skeptics are still alive and well in the Coalition. After 12 years of inaction, and after two years of preparation, the nation demands a genuine timetable and good faith negotiations to give business the certainty they need with climate change.

The Australian Government is also committed to intensively engaging to support an ambitious agreement in Copenhagen.

At Copenhagen we need an ambitious agreement on mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday, the formal UN negotiations are moving slowly.

The UN Secretary-General has said we must maximise the agreement we can reach in Copenhagen. They can resolve some issues, but not others.

Now is time for strenuous efforts by all leaders and ministers.

Denmark's Prime Minister Rasmussen is engaging a growing number of leaders - in the Copenhagen Commitment Circle - to accelerate engagement by leaders.

Australia is committed to playing a leadership role and has joined Mexico and the UN Secretary-General in the initial group of 'friends of the Chair' to help build consensus and draw out concrete commitments from across the world.

In July this year at the G8 meetings in L'Aquila, Australia helped form a 2 degree Celsius 450 ppm ambition for global action on climate change, and it was at this meeting that Australia launched the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, a concrete initiative to make CCS technology a reality.

Australia is currently chair of the Pacific Island Forum which this year delivered the Pacific Leaders' Climate Change Call to Action demanding urgent action on a real threat to the viability of some Pacific communities.

In September, Australia at the request of the UN Secretary-General co-chaired a roundtable at the UN Special Session on Climate Change - with a view to driving a sense of political urgency with other leaders, and representing the views of the Pacific.

Australia has launched the Forest Carbon Partnerships with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea - an initiative providing policy and technical support to protect the great forests in our neighbourhood.

And Australia has established a $150 million Climate Change Adaptation Fund - supporting vulnerable nations dealing with the real impact of climate change, with a strong focus on the Pacific.

For years - and then, with increasing intensity, in recent months - do-nothing climate change skeptics have been mounting a systematic campaign against action on climate change.

Their aim is not to convince every person on earth of the follies of acting on climate change. Their aim is to erode just enough of the political will that action becomes impossible.

By slowing the actions of each individual country, they aim to slowly drag global negotiations on climate change to a standstill. By hampering decisive action at a national level, they aim to make it impossible at an international level.

If Copenhagen does not deliver the outcome we so urgently need, no individual climate change skeptic will be responsible, but each of them will have played their part.

The corrosive effect of climate skeptics eroding the political will to act may be the disintegration of any possibility of meaningful action on climate change.

In this debate the climate change skeptics have erected an intellectual house of cards based on one simple premise: that the cost of not acting is nothing.

When you boil down their arguments, their world government conspiracy theories and their back of the envelope calculations - that in its starkest simplicity and entirety is what is left: that the cost of not acting is nothing.

That is the simplest premise upon which the scepticism of Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Alan, Janet and even Lord Monckton is based. They cling to that single premise like a polar bear clings to a melting iceberg.

Without that premise, their scepticism is sunk. Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet and the Thatcherite Lord Monckton are betting the house on that simple premise that the cost of not acting is nothing.

For people who claim to hold the conservative torch, their scepticism is in fact radical in its riskiness and recklessness. By deliberately undermining and eroding the capacity to achieve both domestic and international action on climate change the skeptics are attempting to force the world to take the single most reckless bet in our long history.

They are betting our future, the future of our children and our grandchildren, and they are doing so based on their own personal intuitions, their personal prejudices and their deeply ingrained political prejudices.

And they are doing so in the total absence of any genuine body of evidence.

Climate change skeptics in all their guises and disguises are not conservatives. They are radicals.

They are reckless gamblers who are betting all our futures on their arrogant assumption that their intuitions should triumph over the evidence.

The logic of these skeptics belongs in a casino, not a science lab, and not in the ranks of any responsible government.

Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet, even Lord Monckton shouldn't even bother with the pretence of science and just admit the currency of their prescription for inaction has all the legitimacy of a roulette wheel.

Basically, let's just sit back, do nothing and see what happens.

The alternative - our alternative - is to base policy on the evidence. No responsible government confronted with the evidence delivered by the 4,000 scientists associated with the international panel could then in conscience choose not to act. In any public company, it would represent a gross contempt of the most basic fiduciary duty.

Malcolm and Barnaby might like to bet the future of Australia on the off chance of winning an election, but this Government will not.

A fairly well-known bloke once said that when gambling:

You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.
Know when to walk away, know when to run.

My message to the climate change skeptics, to the big betters and the big risk takers is this:

You are betting our children's future and the future of our grandchildren. You are betting our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reefs, our economy and our future on an intuition - on a gut feeling; on a political prejudice you have about science. That is too big a risk, too radical a departure from the basic conservative principles of public policy. Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet - stop gambling with our future. You've got to know when to fold 'em - and for the skeptics, that time has come.

The Government I lead will act.



***************************************************************************
Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1955-1961.

: nine. MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR

Major Major Major Major had had a difficult time from the start.

     Like Minniver Cheevy, he had been born too late—exactly thirty-six hours too late for the physical well-being of his mother, a gentle, ailing woman who, after a full day and a half's agony in the rigors of childbirth, was depleted of all resolve to pursue further the argument over the new child's name. In the hospital corridor, her husband moved ahead with the unsmiling determination of someone who knew what he was about. Major Major's father was a towering, gaunt man in heavy shoes and a black woolen suit. He filled out the birth certificate without faltering, betraying no emotion at all as he handed the completed form to the floor nurse. The nurse took it from him without comment and padded out of sight. He watched her go, wondering what she had on underneath.

     Back in the ward, he found his wife lying vanquished beneath the blankets like a desiccated old vegetable, wrinkled, dry and white, her enfeebled tissues absolutely still. Her bed was at the very end of the ward, near a cracked window thickened with grime. Rain splashed from a moiling sky and the day was dreary and cold. In other parts of the hospital chalky people with aged, blue lips were dying on time. The man stood erect beside the bed and gazed down at the woman a long time.

     "I have named the boy Caleb," he announced to her finally in a soft voice. "In accordance with your wishes." The woman made no answer, and slowly the man smiled. He had planned it all perfectly, for his wife was asleep and would never know that he had lied to her as she lay on her sickbed in the poor ward of the county hospital.

     From this meager beginning had sprung the ineffectual squadron commander who was now spending the better part of each working day in Pianosa forging Washington Irving's name to official documents. Major Major forged diligently with his left hand to elude identification, insulated against intrusion by his own undesired authority and camouflaged in his false mustache and dark glasses as an additional safeguard against detection by anyone chancing to peer in through the dowdy celluloid window from which some thief had carved out a slice. In between these two low points of his birth and his success lay thirty-one dismal years of loneliness and frustration.

     Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

     Major Major had three strikes on him from the beginning—his mother, his father and Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost from the moment of his birth. Long before he even suspected who Henry Fonda was, he found himself the subject of unflattering comparisons everywhere he went. Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda. It was not an easy task for him to go through life looking something like Henry Fonda, but he never once thought of quitting, having inherited his perseverance from his father, a lanky man with a good sense of humor.

     Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," he counseled one and all, and everyone said, "Amen."

     Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could. He was a devout man whose pulpit was everywhere.

     "The Lord gave us good farmers two strong hands so that we could take as much as we could grab with both of them," he preached with ardor on the courthouse steps or in front of the A&P as he waited for the bad-tempered gum-chewing young cashier he was after to step outside and give him a nasty look. "If the Lord didn't want us to take as much as we could get," he preached, "He wouldn't have given us two good hands to take it with." And the others murmured, "Amen."

     Major Major's father had a Calvinist's faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone's misfortunes but his own were expressions of God's will. He smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey, and he thrived on good wit and stimulating intellectual conversation, particularly his own when he was lying about his age or telling that good one about God and his wife's difficulties in delivering Major Major. The good one about God and his wife's difficulties had to do with the fact that it had taken God only six days to produce the whole world, whereas his wife had spent a full day and a half in labor just to produce Major Major. A lesser man might have wavered that day in the hospital corridor, a weaker man might have compromised on such excellent substitutes as Drum Major, Minor Major, Sergeant Major, or C. Sharp Major, but Major Major's father had waited fourteen years for just such an opportunity, and he was not a person to waste it. Major Major's father had a good joke about opportunity. " Opportunity only knocks once in this world," he would say. Major Major's father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.

     Being born with a sickly resemblance to Henry Fonda was the first of along series of practical jokes of which destiny was to make Major Major the unhappy victim throughout his joyless life. Being born Major Major Major was the second. The fact that he had been born Major Major Major was a secret known only to his father. Not until Major Major was enrolling in kindergarten was the discovery of his real name made, and then the effects were disastrous. The news killed his mother, who just lost her will to live and wasted away and died, which was just fine with his father, who had decided to marry the bad-tempered girl at the A&P if he had to and who had not been optimistic about his chances of getting his wife off the land without paying her some money or flogging her.

     On Major Major himself the consequences were only slightly less severe. It was a harsh and stunning realization that was forced upon him at so tender an age, the realization that he was not, as he had always been led to believe, Caleb Major, but instead was some total stranger named Major Major Major about whom he knew absolutely nothing and about whom nobody else had ever heard before. What playmates he had withdrew from him and never returned, disposed, as they were, to distrust all strangers, especially one who had already deceived them by pretending to be someone they had known for years. Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always disappointed. Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one. He grew awkwardly into a tall, strange, dreamy boy with fragile eyes and a very delicate mouth whose tentative, groping smile collapsed instantly into hurt disorder at every fresh rebuff.

     He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he leaped, and he always looked before he leaped. They told him never to put off until the next day what he could do the day before, and he never did. He was told to honor his father and his mother, and he honored his father and his mother. He was told that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got into the Army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed. He turned the other cheek on every occasion and always did unto others exactly as he would have had others do unto him. When he gave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was doing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain, committed adultery or coveted his neighbor's ass. In fact, he loved his neighbor and never even bore false witness against him. Major Major's elders disliked him because he was such a flagrant nonconformist.

     Since he had nothing better to do well in, he did well in school. At the state university he took his studies so seriously that he was suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the Communists of being a homosexual. He majored in English history, which was a mistake.

     "English history!" roared the silver-maned senior Senator from his state indignantly. "What's the matter with American history? American history is as good as any history in the world!"

     Major Major switched immediately to American literature, but not before the F.B.I. had opened a file on him. There were six people and a Scotch terrier inhabiting the remote farmhouse Major Major called home, and five of them and the Scotch terrier turned out to be agents for the F.B.I. Soon they had enough derogatory information on Major Major to do whatever they wanted to with him. The only thing they could find to do with him, however, was take him into the Army as a private and make him a major four days later so that Congressmen with nothing else on their minds could go trotting back and forth through the streets of Washington, D.C., chanting, "Who promoted Major Major? Who promoted Major Major?"

     Actually, Major Major had been promoted by an I.B.M. machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father's. When war broke out, he was still docile and compliant. They told him to enlist, and he enlisted. They told him to apply for aviation cadet training, and he applied for aviation cadet training, and the very next night found himself standing barefoot in icy mud at three o'clock in the morning before a tough and belligerent sergeant from the Southwest who told them he could beat hell out of any man in his outfit and was ready to prove it. The recruits in his squadron had all been shaken roughly awake only minutes before by the sergeant's corporals and told to assemble in front of the administration tent. It was still raining on Major Major. They fell into ranks in the civilian clothes they had brought into the Army with them three days before. Those who had lingered to put shoes and socks on were sent back to their cold, wet, dark tents to remove them, and they were all barefoot in the mud as the sergeant ran his stony eyes over their faces and told them he could beat hell out of any man in his outfit. No one was inclined to dispute him.

     Major Major's unexpected promotion to major the next day plunged the belligerent sergeant into a bottomless gloom, for he was no longer able to boast that he could beat hell out of any man in his outfit. He brooded for hours in his tent like Saul, receiving no visitors, while his elite guard of corporals stood discouraged watch outside. At three o'clock in the morning he found his solution, and Major Major and the other recruits were again shaken roughly awake and ordered to assemble barefoot in the drizzly glare at the administration tent, where the sergeant was already waiting, his fists clenched on his hips cockily, so eager to speak that he could hardly wait for them to arrive.

     "Me and Major Major," he boasted, in the same tough, clipped tones of the night before, "can beat hell out of any man in my outfit."

     The officers on the base took action on the Major Major problem later that same day. How could they cope with a major like Major Major? To demean him personally would be to demean all other officers of equal or lesser rank. To treat him with courtesy, on the other hand, was unthinkable. Fortunately, Major Major had applied for aviation cadet training. Orders transferring him away were sent to the mimeograph room late in the afternoon, and at three o'clock in the morning Major Major was again shaken roughly awake, bidden Godspeed by the sergeant and placed aboard a plane heading west.

     Lieutenant Scheisskopf turned white as a sheet when Major Major reported to him in California with bare feet and mudcaked toes. Major Major had taken it for granted that he was being shaken roughly awake again to stand barefoot in the mud and had left his shoes and socks in the tent. The civilian clothing in which he reported for duty to Lieutenant Scheisskopf was rumpled and dirty. Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who had not yet made his reputation as a parader, shuddered violently at the picture Major Major would make marching barefoot in his squadron that coming Sunday.

     "Go to the hospital quickly," he mumbled, when he had recovered sufficiently to speak, "and tell them you're sick. Stay there until your allowance for uniforms catches up with you and you have some money to buy some clothes. And some shoes. Buy some shoes."

     "Yes, sir."

     "I don't think you have to call me 'sir,' sir," Lieutenant Scheisskopf pointed out. "You outrank me."

     "Yes, sir. I may outrank you, sir, but you're still my commanding officer."

     "Yes, sir, that's right," Lieutenant Scheisskopf agreed. "You may outrank me, sir, but I'm still your commanding officer. So you better do what I tell you, sir, or you'll get into trouble. Go to the hospital and tell them you're sick, sir. Stay there until your uniform allowance catches up with you and you have some money to buy some uniforms."

     "Yes, sir."

     "And some shoes, sir. Buy some shoes the first chance you get, sir."

     "Yes, sir. I will, sir."

     "Thank you, sir."

     Life in cadet school for Major Major was no different than life had been for him all along. Whoever he was with always wanted him to be with someone else. His instructors gave him preferred treatment at every stage in order to push him along quickly and be rid of him. In almost no time he had his pilot's wings and found himself overseas, where things began suddenly to improve. All his life, Major Major had longed for but one thing, to be absorbed, and in Pianosa, for a while, he finally was. Rank meant little to the men on combat duty, and relations between officers and enlisted men were relaxed and informal. Men whose names he didn't even know said "Hi" and invited him to go swimming or play basketball. His ripest hours were spent in the day-long basketball games no one gave a damn about winning. Score was never kept, and the number of players might vary from one to thirty-five. Major Major had never played basketball or any other game before, but his great, bobbing height and rapturous enthusiasm helped make up for his innate clumsiness and lack of experience. Major Major found true happiness there on the lopsided basketball court with the officers and enlisted men who were almost his friends. If there were no winners, there were no losers, and Major Major enjoyed every gamboling moment right up till the day Colonel Cathcart roared up in his jeep after Major Duluth was killed and made it impossible for him ever to enjoy playing basketball there again.

     "You're the new squadron commander," Colonel Cathcart had shouted rudely across the railroad ditch to him. "But don't think it means anything, because it doesn't. All it means is that you're the new squadron commander."

     Colonel Cathcart had nursed an implacable grudge against Major Major for a long time. A superfluous major on his rolls meant an untidy table of organization and gave ammunition to the men at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters who Colonel Cathcart was positive were his enemies and rivals. Colonel Cathcart had been praying for just some stroke of good luck like Major Duluth's death. He had been plagued by one extra major; he now had an opening for one major. He appointed Major Major squadron commander and roared away in his jeep as abruptly as he had come.

     For Major Major, it meant the end of the game. His face flushed with discomfort, and he was rooted to the spot in disbelief as the rain clouds gathered above him again. When he turned to his teammates, he encountered a reef of curious, reflective faces all gazing at him woodenly with morose and inscrutable animosity. He shivered with shame. When the game resumed, it was not good any longer. When he dribbled, no one tried to stop him; when he called for a pass, whoever had the ball passed it; and when he missed a basket, no one raced him for the rebound. The only voice was his own. The next day was the same, and the day after that he did not come back.

     Almost on cue, everyone in the squadron stopped talking to him and started staring at him. He walked through life self-consciously with downcast eyes and burning cheeks, the object of contempt, envy, suspicion, resentment and malicious innuendo everywhere he went. People who had hardly noticed his resemblance to Henry Fonda before now never ceased discussing it, and there were even those who hinted sinisterly that Major Major had been elevated to squadron commander because he resembled Henry Fonda. Captain Black, who had aspired to the position himself, maintained that Major Major really was Henry Fonda but was too chickenshit to admit it.

     Major Major floundered bewilderedly from one embarrassing catastrophe to another. Without consulting him, Sergeant Towser had his belongings moved into the roomy trailer Major Duluth had occupied alone, and when Major Major came rushing breathlessly into the orderly room to report the theft of his things, the young corporal there scared him half out of his wits by leaping to his feet and shouting "Attention!" the moment he appeared. Major Major snapped to attention with all the rest in the orderly room, wondering what important personage had entered behind him. Minutes passed in rigid silence, and the whole lot of them might have stood there at attention till doomsday if Major Danby had not dropped by from Group to congratulate Major Major twenty minutes later and put them all at ease.

     Major Major fared even more lamentably at the mess hall, where Milo, his face fluttery with smiles, was waiting to usher him proudly to a small table he had set up in front and decorated with an embroidered tablecloth and a nosegay of posies in a pink cut-glass vase. Major Major hung back with horror, but he was not bold enough to resist with all the others watching. Even Havermeyer had lifted his head from his plate to gape at him with his heavy, pendulous jaw. Major Major submitted meekly to Milo 's tugging and cowered in disgrace at his private table throughout the whole meal. The food was ashes in his mouth, but he swallowed every mouthful rather than risk offending any of the men connected with its preparation. Alone with Milo later, Major Major felt protest stir for the first time and said he would prefer to continue eating with the other officers. Milo told him it wouldn't work.

     "I don't see what there is to work," Major Major argued. "Nothing ever happened before." "You were never the squadron commander before."

     "Major Duluth was the squadron commander and he always ate at the same table with the rest of the men."

     "It was different with Major Duluth, Sir."

     "In what way was it different with Major Duluth?"

     "I wish you wouldn't ask me that, sir," said Milo.

     "Is it because I look like Henry Fonda?" Major Major mustered the courage to demand.

     "Some people say you are Henry Fonda," Milo answered.

     "Well, I'm not Henry Fonda," Major Major exclaimed, in a voice quavering with exasperation. "And I don't look the least bit like him. And even if I do look like Henry Fonda, what difference does that make?"

     "It doesn't make any difference. That's what I'm trying to tell you, sir. It's just not the same with you as it was with Major Duluth."

     And it just wasn't the same, for when Major Major, at the next meal, stepped from the food counter to sit with the others at the regular tables, he was frozen in his tracks by the impenetrable wall of antagonism thrown up by their faces and stood petrified with his tray quivering in his hands until Milo glided forward wordlessly to rescue him, by leading him tamely to his private table. Major Major gave up after that and always ate at his table alone with his back to the others. He was certain they resented him because he seemed too good to eat with them now that he was squadron commander. There was never any conversation in the mess tent when Major Major was present. He was conscious that other officers tried to avoid eating at the same time, and everyone was greatly relieved when he stopped coming there altogether and began taking his meals in his trailer.

     Major Major began forging Washington Irving's name to official documents the day after the first C.I.D. man showed up to interrogate him about somebody at the hospital who had been doing it and gave him the idea. He had been bored and dissatisfied in his new position. He had been made squadron commander but had no idea what he was supposed to do as squadron commander, unless all he was supposed to do was forge Washington Irving's name to official documents and listen to the isolated clinks and thumps of Major—de Coverley's horseshoes falling to the ground outside the window of his small office in the rear of the orderly-room tent. He was hounded incessantly by an impression of vital duties left unfulfilled and waited in vain for his responsibilities to overtake him. He seldom went out unless it was absolutely necessary, for he could not get used to being stared at. Occasionally, the monotony was broken by some officer or enlisted man Sergeant Towser referred to him on some matter that Major Major was unable to cope with and referred right back to Sergeant Towser for sensible disposition. Whatever he was supposed to get done as squadron commander apparently was getting done without any assistance from him. He grew moody and depressed. At times he thought seriously of going with all his sorrows to see the chaplain, but the chaplain seemed so overburdened with miseries of his own that Major Major shrank from adding to his troubles. Besides, he was not quite sure if chaplains were for squadron commanders.

     He had never been quite sure about Major—de Coverley, either, who, when he was not away renting apartments or kidnaping foreign laborers, had nothing more pressing to do than pitch horseshoes. Major Major often paid strict attention to the horseshoes falling softly against the earth or riding down around the small steel pegs in the ground. He peeked out at Major—de Coverley for hours and marveled that someone so august had nothing more important to do. He was often tempted to join Major—de Coverley, but pitching horseshoes all day long seemed almost as dull as signing "Major Major Major" to official documents, and Major– de Coverley's countenance was so forbidding that Major Major was in awe of approaching him.

     Major Major wondered about his relationship to Major—de Coverley and about Major—de Coverley's relationship to him. He knew that Major—de Coverley was his executive officer, but he did not know what that meant, and he could not decide whether in Major—de Coverley he was blessed with a lenient superior or cursed with a delinquent subordinate. He did not want to ask Sergeant Towser, of whom he was secretly afraid, and there was no one else he could ask, least of all Major—de Coverley. Few people ever dared approach Major—de Coverley about anything and the only officer foolish enough to pitch one of his horseshoes was stricken the very next day with the worst case of Pianosan crud that Gus or Wes or even Doc Daneeka had ever seen or even heard about. Everyone was positive the disease had been inflicted upon the poor officer in retribution by Major—de Coverley, although no one was sure how.

     Most of the official documents that came to Major Major's desk did not concern him at all. The vast majority consisted of allusions to prior communications which Major Major had never seen or heard of. There was never any need to look them up, for the instructions were invariably to disregard. In the space of a single productive minute, therefore, he might endorse twenty separate documents each advising him to pay absolutely no attention to any of the others. From General Peckem's office on the mainland came prolix bulletins each day headed by such cheery homilies as "Procrastination is the Thief of Time" and "Cleanliness is Next to Godliness."

     General Peckem's communications about cleanliness and procrastination made Major Major feel like a filthy procrastinator, and he always got those out of the way as quickly as he could. The only official documents that interested him were those occasional ones pertaining to the unfortunate second lieutenant who had been killed on the mission over Orvieto less than two hours after he arrived on Pianosa and whose partly unpacked belongings were still in Yossarian's tent. Since the unfortunate lieutenant had reported to the operations tent instead of to the orderly room, Sergeant Towser had decided that it would be safest to report him as never having reported to the squadron at all, and the occasional documents relating to him dealt with the fact that he seemed to have vanished into thin air, which, in one way, was exactly what did happen to him. In the long run, Major Major was grateful for the official documents that came to his desk, for sitting in his office signing them all day long was a lot better than sitting in his office all day long not signing them. They gave him something to do.

     Inevitably, every document he signed came back with a fresh page added for a new signature by him after intervals of from two to ten days. They were always much thicker than formerly, for in between the sheet bearing his last endorsement and the sheet added for his new endorsement were the sheets bearing the most recent endorsements of all the other officers in scattered locations who were also occupied in signing their names to that same official document. Major Major grew despondent as he watched simple communications swell prodigiously into huge manuscripts. No matter how many times he signed one, it always came back for still another signature, and he began to despair of ever being free of any of them. One day—it was the day after the C.I.D. man's first visit—Major Major signed Washington Irving's name to one of the documents instead of his own, just to see how it would feel. He liked it. He liked it so much that for the rest of that afternoon he did the same with all the official documents. It was an act of impulsive frivolity and rebellion for which he knew afterward he would be punished severely. The next morning he entered his office in trepidation and waited to see what would happen. Nothing happened.

     He had sinned, and it was good, for none of the documents to which he had signed Washington Irving's name ever came back! Here, at last, was progress, and Major Major threw himself into his new career with uninhibited gusto. Signing Washington Irving's name to official documents was not much of a career, perhaps, but it was less monotonous than signing "Major Major Major." When Washington Irving did grow monotonous, he could reverse the order and sign Irving Washington until that grew monotonous. And he was getting something done, for none of the documents signed with either of these names ever came back to the squadron.

     What did come back, eventually, was a second C.I.D. man, masquerading as a pilot. The men knew he was a C.I.D. man because he confided to them he was and urged each of them not to reveal his true identity to any of the other men to whom he had already confided that he was a C.I.D. man.

     "You're the only one in the squadron who knows I'm a C.I.D. man," he confided to Major Major, "and it's absolutely essential that it remain a secret so that my efficiency won't be impaired. Do you understand?"

     "Sergeant Towser knows."

     "Yes, I know. I had to tell him in order to get in to see you. But I know he won't tell a soul under any circumstances."

     "He told me," said Major Major. "He told me there was a C.I.D. man outside to see me."

     "That bastard. I'll have to throw a security check on him. I wouldn't leave any top-secret documents lying around here if I were you. At least not until I make my report."

     "I don't get any top-secret documents," said Major Major.

     "That's the kind I mean. Lock them in your cabinet where Sergeant Towser can't get his hands on them."

     "Sergeant Towser has the only key to the cabinet."

     "I'm afraid we're wasting time," said the second C.I.D. man rather stiffly. He was a brisk, pudgy, high-strung person whose movements were swift and certain. He took a number of photostats out of a large red expansion envelope he had been hiding conspicuously beneath a leather flight jacket painted garishly with pictures of airplanes flying through orange bursts of flak and with orderly rows of little bombs signifying fifty-five combat missions flown. "Have you ever seen any of these?"

     Major Major looked with a blank expression at copies of personal correspondence from the hospital on which the censoring officer had written "Washington Irving" or "Irving Washington."

     "No."

     "How about these?"

     Major Major gazed next at copies of official documents addressed to him to which he had been signing the same signatures.

     "No."

     "Is the man who signed these names in your squadron?"

     "Which one? There are two names here."

     "Either one. We figure that Washington Irving and Irving Washington are one man and that he's using two names just to throw us off the track. That's done very often you know."

     "I don't think there's a man with either of those names in my squadron."

     A look of disappointment crossed the second C.I.D. man's face. "He's a lot cleverer than we thought," he observed. "He's using a third name and posing as someone else. And I think… yes, I think I know what that third name is." With excitement and inspiration, he held another photostat out for Major Major to study. "How about this?"

     Major Major bent forward slightly and saw a copy of the piece of V mail from which Yossarian had blacked out everything but the name Mary and on which he had written, "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." Major Major shook his head.

     "I've never seen it before."

     "Do you know who A. T. Tappman is?"

     "He's the group chaplain."

     "That locks it up," said the second C.I.D. man. "Washington Irving is the group chaplain."

     Major Major felt a twinge of alarm. "A. T. Tappman is the group chaplain," he corrected.

     "Are you sure?"

     "Yes."

     "Why should the group chaplain write this on a letter?"

     "Perhaps somebody else wrote it and forged his name."

     "Why should somebody want to forge the group chaplain's name?"

     "To escape detection."

     "You may be right," the second C.I.D. man decided after an instant's hesitation, and smacked his lips crisply. "Maybe we're confronted with a gang, with two men working together who just happen to have opposite names. Yes, I'm sure that's it. One of them here in the squadron, one of them up at the hospital and one of them with the chaplain. That makes three men, doesn't it? Are you absolutely sure you never saw any of these official documents before?"

     "I would have signed them if I had."

     "With whose name?" asked the second C.I.D. man cunningly. "Yours or Washington Irving's?"

     "With my own name," Major Major told him. "I don't even know Washington Irving's name."

     The second C.I.D. man broke into a smile.

     "Major, I'm glad you're in the clear. It means we'll be able to work together, and I'm going to need every man I can get. Somewhere in the European theater of operations is a man who's getting his hands on communications addressed to you. Have you any idea who it can be?"

     "No."

     "Well, I have a pretty good idea," said the second C.I.D. man, and leaned forward to whisper confidentially. "That bastard Towser. Why else would he go around shooting his mouth off about me? Now, you keep your eyes open and let me know the minute you hear anyone even talking about Washington Irving. I'll throw a security check on the chaplain and everyone else around here."

     The moment he was gone, the first C.I.D. man jumped into Major Major's office through the window and wanted to know who the second C.I.D. man was. Major Major barely recognized him.

     "He was a C.I.D. man," Major Major told him.

     "Like hell he was," said the first C.I.D. man. "I'm the C.I.D. man around here."

     Major Major barely recognized him because he was wearing a faded maroon corduroy bathrobe with open seams under both arms, linty flannel pajamas, and worn house slippers with one flapping sole. This was regulation hospital dress, Major Major recalled. The man had added about twenty pounds and seemed bursting with good health.

     "I'm really a very sick man," he whined. "I caught cold in the hospital from a fighter pilot and came down with a very serious case of pneumonia."

     "I'm very sorry," Major Major said.

     "A lot of good that does me," the C.I.D. man sniveled. "I don't want your sympathy. I just want you to know what I'm going through. I came down to warn you that Washington Irving seems to have shifted his base of operations from the hospital to your squadron. You haven't heard anyone around here talking about Washington Irving, have you?"

     "As a matter of fact, I have," Major Major answered. "That man who was just in here. He was talking about Washington Irving."

     "Was he really?" the first C.I.D. man cried with delight. "This might be just what we needed to crack the case wide open! You keep him under surveillance twenty-four hours a day while I rush back to the hospital and write my superiors for further instructions." The C.I.D. man jumped out of Major Major's office through the window and was gone.

     A minute later, the flap separating Major Major's office from the orderly room flew open and the second C.I.D. man was back, puffing frantically in haste. Gasping for breath, he shouted, "I just saw a man in red pajamas jumping out of your window and go running up the road! Didn't you see him?"

     "He was here talking to me," Major Major answered.

     "I thought that looked mighty suspicious, a man jumping out the window in red pajamas." The man paced about the small office in vigorous circles. "At first I thought it was you, hightailing it for Mexico. But now I see it wasn't you. He didn't say anything about Washington Irving, did he?"

     "As a matter of fact," said Major Major, "he did."

     "He did?" cried the second C.I.D. man. "That's fine! This might be just the break we needed to crack the case wide open. Do you know where we can find him?"

     "At the hospital. He's really a very sick man."

     "That's great!" exclaimed the second C.I.D. man. "I'll go right up there after him. It would be best if I went incognito. I'll go explain the situation at the medical tent and have them send me there as a patient."

     "They won't send me to the hospital as a patient unless I'm sick," he reported back to Major Major. "Actually, I am pretty sick. I've been meaning to turn myself in for a checkup, and this will be a good opportunity. I'll go back to the medical tent and tell them I'm sick, and I'll get sent to the hospital that way."

     "Look what they did to me," he reported back to Major Major with purple gums. His distress was inconsolable. He carried his shoes and socks in his hands, and his toes had been painted with gentian-violet solution, too. "Who ever heard of a C.I.D. man with purple gums?" he moaned.

     He walked away from the orderly room with his head down and tumbled into a slit trench and broke his nose. His temperature was still normal, but Gus and Wes made an exception of him and sent him to the hospital in an ambulance.

     Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie. Had he told the truth to the second C.I.D. man, he would have found himself in trouble. Instead he had lied and he was free to continue his work.

     He became more circumspect in his work as a result of the visit from the second C.I.D. man. He did all his signing with his left hand and only while wearing the dark glasses and false mustache he had used unsuccessfully to help him begin playing basketball again. As an additional precaution, he made a happy switch from Washington Irving to John Milton. John Milton was supple and concise. Like Washington Irving, he could be reversed with good effect whenever he grew monotonous. Furthermore, he enabled Major Major to double his output, for John Milton was so much shorter than either his own name or Washington Irving's and took so much less time to write. John Milton proved fruitful in still one more respect. He was versatile, and Major Major soon found himself incorporating the signature in fragments of imaginary dialogues. Thus, typical endorsements on the official documents might read, "John Milton is a sadist" or "Have you seen Milton, John?" One signature of which he was especially proud read, "Is anybody in the John, Milton?" John Milton threw open whole new vistas filled with charming, inexhaustible possibilities that promised to ward off monotony forever. Major Major went back to Washington Irving when John Milton grew monotonous.

     Major Major had bought the dark glasses and false mustache in Rome in a final, futile attempt to save himself from the swampy degradation into which he was steadily sinking. First there had been the awful humiliation of the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, when not one of the thirty or forty people circulating competitive loyalty oaths would even allow him to sign. Then, just when that was blowing over, there was the matter of Clevinger's plane disappearing so mysteriously in thin air with every member of the crew, and blame for the strange mishap centering balefully on him because he had never signed any of the loyalty oaths.

     The dark glasses had large magenta rims. The false black mustache was a flamboyant organ-grinder's, and he wore them both to the basketball game one day when he felt he could endure his loneliness no longer. He affected an air of jaunty familiarity as he sauntered to the court and prayed silently that he would not be recognized. The others pretended not to recognize him, and he began to have fun. Just as he finished congratulating himself on his innocent ruse he was bumped hard by one of his opponents and knocked to his knees. Soon he was bumped hard again, and it dawned on him that they did recognize him and that they were using his disguise as a license to elbow, trip and maul him. They did not want him at all. And just as he did realize this, the players on his team fused instinctively with the players on the other team into a single, howling, bloodthirsty mob that descended upon him from all sides with foul curses and swinging fists. They knocked him to the ground, kicked him while he was on the ground, attacked him again after he had struggled blindly to his feet. He covered his face with his hands and could not see. They swarmed all over each other in their frenzied compulsion to bludgeon him, kick him, gouge him, trample him. He was pummeled spinning to the edge of the ditch and sent slithering down on his head and shoulders. At the bottom he found his footing, clambered up the other wall and staggered away beneath the hail of hoots and stones with which they pelted him until he lurched into shelter around a corner of the orderly room tent. His paramount concern throughout the entire assault was to keep his dark glasses and false mustache in place so that he might continue pretending he was somebody else and be spared the dreaded necessity of having to confront them with his authority.

     Back in his office, he wept; and when he finished weeping he washed the blood from his mouth and nose, scrubbed the dirt from the abrasions on his cheek and forehead, and summoned Sergeant Towser.

     "From now on," he said, "I don't want anyone to come in to see me while I'm here. Is that clear?"

     "Yes, sir," said Sergeant Towser. "Does that include me?"

     "Yes."

     "I see. Will that be all?"

     "Yes."

     "What shall I say to the people who do come to see you while you're here?"

     "Tell them I'm in and ask them to wait."

     "Yes, sir. For how long?"

     "Until I've left."

     "And then what shall I do with them?"

     "I don't care."

     "May I send them in to see you after you've left?"

     "Yes."

     "But you won't be here then, will you?"

     "No."

     "Yes, sir. Will that be all?"

     "Yes."

     "Yes, sir."

     "From now on," Major Major said to the middle-aged enlisted man who took care of his trailer, "I don't want you to come here while I'm here to ask me if there's anything you can do for me. Is that clear?"

     "Yes, sir," said the orderly. "When should I come here to find out if there's anything you want me to do for you?"

     "When I'm not here."

     "Yes, sir. And what should I do?"

     "Whatever I tell you to."

     "But you won't be here to tell me. Will you?"

     "No."

     "Then what should I do?"

     "Whatever has to be done."

     "Yes, sir."

     "That will be all," said Major Major.

     "Yes, sir," said the orderly. "Will that be all?"

     "No," said Major Major. "Don't come in to clean, either. Don't come in for anything unless you're sure I'm not here."

     "Yes, sir. But how can I always be sure?"

     "If you're not sure, just assume that I am here and go away until you are sure. Is that clear?"

     "Yes, sir."

     "I'm sorry to have to talk to you in this way, but I have to. Goodbye."

     "Goodbye, sir."

     "And thank you. For everything."

     "Yes, sir."

     "From now on," Major Major said to Milo Minderbinder, "I'm not going to come to the mess hall any more. I'll have all my meals brought to me in my trailer."

     "I think that's a good idea, sir," Milo answered. "Now I'll be able to serve you special dishes that the others will never know about. I'm sure you'll enjoy them. Colonel Cathcart always does."

     "I don't want any special dishes. I want exactly what you serve all the other officers. Just have whoever brings it knock once on my door and leave the tray on the step. Is that clear?"

     "Yes, sir," said Milo. "That's very clear. I've got some live Maine lobsters hidden away that I can serve you tonight with an excellent Roquefort salad and two frozen éclairs that were smuggled out of Paris only yesterday together with an important member of the French underground. Will that do for a start?"

     "No."

     "Yes, sir. I understand."

     For dinner that night Milo served him broiled Maine lobster with excellent Roquefort salad and two frozen éclairs. Major Major was annoyed. If he sent it back, though, it would only go to waste or to somebody else, and Major Major had a weakness for broiled lobster. He ate with a guilty conscience. The next day for lunch there was terrapin Maryland with a whole quart of Dom Pérignon 1937, and Major Major gulped it down without a thought.

     After Milo, there remained only the men in the orderly room, and Major Major avoided them by entering and leaving every time through the dingy celluloid window of his office. The window unbuttoned and was low and large and easy to jump through from either side. He managed the distance between the orderly room and his trailer by darting around the corner of the tent when the coast was clear, leaping down into the railroad ditch and dashing along with head bowed until he attained the sanctuary of the forest. Abreast of his trailer, he left the ditch and wove his way speedily toward home through the dense underbrush, in which the only person he ever encountered was Captain Flume, who, drawn and ghostly, frightened him half to death one twilight by materializing without warning out of a patch of dewberry bushes to complain that Chief White Halfoat had threatened to slit his throat open from ear to ear.

     "If you ever frighten me like that again," Major Major told him, "I'll slit your throat open from ear to ear."

     Captain Flume gasped and dissolved right back into the patch of dewberry bushes, and Major Major never set eyes on him again.

     When Major Major looked back on what he had accomplished, he was pleased. In the midst of a few foreign acres teeming with more than two hundred people, he had succeeded in becoming a recluse. With a little ingenuity and vision, he had made it all but impossible for anyone in the squadron to talk to him, which was just fine with everyone, he noticed, since no one wanted to talk to him anyway. No one, it turned out, but that madman Yossarian, who brought him down with a flying tackle one day as he was scooting along the bottom of the ditch to his trailer for lunch.

     The last person in the squadron Major Major wanted to be brought down with a flying tackle by was Yossarian. There was something inherently disreputable about Yossarian, always carrying on so disgracefully about that dead man in his tent who wasn't even there and then taking off all his clothes after the Avignon mission and going around without them right up to the day General Dreedle stepped up to pin a medal on him for his heroism over Ferrara and found him standing in formation stark naked. No one in the world had the power to remove the dead man's disorganized effects from Yossarian's tent. Major Major had forfeited the authority when he permitted Sergeant Towser to report the lieutenant who had been killed over Orvieto less than two hours after he arrived in the squadron as never having arrived in the squadron at all. The only one with any right to remove his belongings from Yossarian's tent, it seemed to Major Major, was Yossarian himself, and Yossarian, it seemed to Major Major, had no right.

     Major Major groaned after Yossarian brought him down with a flying tackle, and tried to wiggle to his feet. Yossarian wouldn't let him.

     "Captain Yossarian," Yossarian said, "requests permission to speak to the major at once about a matter of life or death."

     "Let me up, please," Major Major bid him in cranky discomfort. "I can't return your salute while I'm lying on my arm."

     Yossarian released him. They stood up slowly. Yossarian saluted again and repeated his request.

     "Let's go to my office," Major Major said. "I don't think this is the best place to talk."

     "Yes, sir," answered Yossarian.

     They smacked the gravel from their clothing and walked in constrained silence to the entrance of the orderly room.

     "Give me a minute or two to put some mercurochrome on these cuts. Then have Sergeant Towser send you in."

     "Yes, sir."

     Major Major strode with dignity to the rear of the orderly room without glancing at any of the clerks and typists working at the desks and filing cabinets. He let the flap leading to his office fall closed behind him. As soon as he was alone in his office, he raced across the room to the window and jumped outside to dash away. He found Yossarian blocking his path. Yossarian was waiting at attention and saluted again.

     "Captain Yossarian requests permission to speak to the major at once about a matter of life or death," he repeated determinedly.

     "Permission denied," Major Major snapped.

     "That won't do it."

     Major Major gave in. "All right," he conceded wearily. "I'll talk to you. Please jump inside my office."

     "After you."

     They jumped inside the office. Major Major sat down, and Yossarian moved around in front of his desk and told him that he did not want to fly any more combat missions. What could he do? Major Major asked himself. All he could do was what he had been instructed to do by Colonel Korn and hope for the best.

     "Why not?" he asked.

     "I'm afraid."

     "That's nothing to be ashamed of," Major Major counseled him kindly. "We're all afraid."

     "I'm not ashamed," Yossarian said. "I'm just afraid."

     "You wouldn't be normal if you were never afraid. Even the bravest men experience fear. One of the biggest jobs we all face in combat is to overcome our fear."

     "Oh, come on, Major. Can't we do without that horseshit?"

     Major Major lowered his gaze sheepishly and fiddled with his fingers. "What do you want me to tell you?"

     "That I've flown enough missions and can go home."

     "How many have you flown?"

     "Fifty-one."

     "You've only got four more to fly."

     "He'll raise them. Every time I get close he raises them."

     "Perhaps he won't this time."

     "He never sends anyone home, anyway. He just keeps them around waiting for rotation orders until he doesn't have enough men left for the crews, and then raises the number of missions and throws them all back on combat status. He's been doing that ever since he got here."

     "You mustn't blame Colonel Cathcart for any delay with the orders," Major Major advised. "It's Twenty-seventh Air Force's responsibility to process the orders promptly once they get them from us."

     "He could still ask for replacements and send us home when the orders did come back. Anyway, I've been told that Twenty-seventh Air Force wants only forty missions and that it's only his own idea to get us to fly fifty-five."

     "I wouldn't know anything about that," Major Major answered. "Colonel Cathcart is our commanding officer and we must obey him. Why don't you fly the four more missions and see what happens?"

     "I don't want to."

     What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat, a man who was at least as mature and intelligent as you were and who you had to pretend was not? What could you say to him?

     "Suppose we let you pick your missions and fly milk runs," Major Major said. "That way you can fly the four missions and not run any risks."

     "I don't want to fly milk runs. I don't want to be in the war any more."

     "Would you like to see our country lose?" Major Major asked.

     "We won't lose. We've got more men, more money and more material. There are ten million men in uniform who could replace me. Some people are getting killed and a lot more are making money and having fun. Let somebody else get killed."

     "But suppose everybody on our side felt that way."

     "Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way. Wouldn't I?"

     What could you possibly say to him? Major Major wondered forlornly. One thing he could not say was that there was nothing he could do. To say there was nothing he could do would suggest he would do something if he could and imply the existence of an error of injustice in Colonel Korn's policy. Colonel Korn had been most explicit about that. He must never say there was nothing he could do.

     "I'm sorry," he said. "But there's nothing I can do."



***************************************************************************
Israelis 'seize Iran arms ship', BBC, 4 Nov. 2009.

Israel's navy has intercepted a ship carrying hundreds of tonnes of Iranian weapons intended for Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israeli military has said.

The Antiguan-flagged vessel, Francop, was boarded 160km (100 miles) off the Israeli coast, the military said, and has been towed to the port of Ashdod.

PM Benjamin Netanyahu said the arms were intended to strike Israeli cities.

In recent months Israel has stepped up efforts to combat the smuggling of arms to both Hezbollah and Hamas militants.

Hezbollah has not yet commented on the latest incident. Iran and Syria have both rejected Israel's allegations.

'Disguised cargo'

The Israeli military said marines had boarded the 137m (450ft) Francop after its captain agreed to the search and no force was used.

The vessel was intercepted "near Cyprus", the Israeli military said, though it gave no further details on where this took place.

The country's deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, said the ship's crew were not thought to have been aware of the smuggling operation.

A spokesperson for the military said there were "dozens of shipping containers, carrying numerous weapons, disguised as civilian cargo among hundreds of other containers on board".

The spokesperson added: "The weapons originate from Iran and were intended to reach the Hezbollah terror organisation for use against the state of Israel and its citizens."

The Associated Press news agency reported the vessel was operated by Cyprus-based shipping company United Feeder Services and the company had said the cargo was picked up in Damietta in Egypt.

The exact route of the ship has not been confirmed but Israel's Haaretz newspaper said it originated in Iran and had docked in Yemen and Sudan before using the Suez Canal.

A United Feeder Services source told news agencies the ship was scheduled to dock in Lebanon.

The Israeli military said an Iranian document had been found on the ship.

A military spokesperson said: "All the cargo certificates are stamped at the ports of origin and this one was stamped at an Iranian port."

However, in a news conference in Tehran broadcast on Iran's state-run Press TV, visiting Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said the ship was not carrying Iranian-made weapons and that the cargo comprised Syrian exports to Iran.

Mr Netanyahu congratulated the army, navy and security forces on a successful action to prevent the supply of weapons.

Since Israel's offensive in Gaza last December and January, the Israeli navy and air force have been have conducting intense searches in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea for ships smuggling weapons either to Hezbollah or to Hamas in Gaza.

In February Israel said a vessel detained off Cyprus was carrying Iranian weapons to Hamas in Gaza. Iran denied the claim.

In 2002 the Israeli navy captured the Karin-A, which was carrying some 50 tonnes of arms thought to be destined for Gaza.

Analysis by Paul Wood, BBC News, Jerusalem

The seizure of the Francop is being celebrated by Israeli generals and politicians as a major success. The vessel, says the military, was carrying enough weapons to supply Hezbollah for a month or more of ground fighting.

The seizure comes after Israel carried out a joint military exercise with the Americans. The unspoken assumption of that exercise - for many in Israel at least - is that Israel will one day carry out military strikes against Iran's nuclear programme. Tehran will then hit back itself and also activate Hamas and Hezbollah.

Even if that sequence does not take place, Israeli military intelligence believes the "northern front" is the most likely place for the next fight. Syria denies weapons were on board - accusing Israel of an act of piracy - but the seizure is another sign of how impermanent is the peace in this part of the world; how all sides are looking ahead to, and preparing for, the next round of hostilities.


Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1955-1961.

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Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1955-1961.

twenty-two. MILO THE MAYOR

That was the mission on which Yossarian lost his nerve. Yossarian lost his nerve on the mission to Avignon because Snowden lost his guts, and Snowden lost his guts because their pilot that day was Huple, who was only fifteen years old, and their co-pilot was Dobbs, who was even worse and who wanted Yossarian to join with him in a plot to murder Colonel Cathcart. Huple was a good pilot, Yossarian knew, but he was only a kid, and Dobbs had no confidence in him, either, and wrested the controls away without warning after they had dropped their bombs, going berserk in mid-air and tipping the plane over into that heart-stopping, ear-splitting, indescribably petrifying fatal dive that tore Yossarian's earphones free from their connection and hung him helplessly to the roof of the nose by the top of his head.

     Oh, God! Yossarian had shrieked soundlessly as he felt them all falling. Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! he had shrieked beseechingly through lips that could not open as the plane fell and he dangled without weight by the top of his head until Huple managed to seize the controls back and leveled the plane out down inside the crazy, craggy, patchwork canyon of crashing antiaircraft fire from which they had climbed away and from which they would now have to escape again. Almost at once there was a thud and a hole the size of a big fist in the plexiglass. Yossarian's cheeks were stinging with shimmering splinters. There was no blood.

     "What happened? What happened?" he cried, and trembled violently when he could not hear his own voice in his ears. He was cowed by the empty silence on the intercom and almost too horrified to move as he crouched like a trapped mouse on his hands and knees and waited without daring to breathe until he finally spied the gleaming cylindrical jack plug of his headset swinging back and forth in front of his eyes and jammed it back into its receptacle with fingers that rattled. Oh, God! he kept shrieking with no abatement of terror as the flak thumped and mushroomed all about him. Oh, God!

     Dobbs was weeping when Yossarian jammed his jack plug back into the intercom system and was able to hear again.

     "Help him, help him," Dobbs was sobbing. "Help him, help him."

     "Help who? Help who?" Yossarian called back. "Help who?"

     "The bombardier, the bombardier," Dobbs cried. "He doesn't answer. Help the bombardier, help the bombardier."

     "I'm the bombardier," Yossarian cried back at him. "I'm the bombardier. I'm all right. I'm all right."

     "Then help him, help him," Dobbs wept. "Help him, help him."

     "Help who? Help who?"

     "The radio-gunner," Dobbs begged. "Help the radio-gunner."

     "I'm cold," Snowden whimpered feebly over the intercom system then in a bleat of plaintive agony. "Please help me. I'm cold."

     And Yossarian crept out through the crawlway and climbed up over the bomb bay and down into the rear section of the plane where Snowden lay on the floor wounded and freezing to death in a yellow splash of sunlight near the new tail-gunner lying stretched out on the floor beside him in a dead faint.

     Dobbs was the worst pilot in the world and knew it, a shattered wreck of a virile young man who was continually striving to convince his superiors that he was no longer fit to pilot a plane. None of his superiors would listen, and it was the day the number of missions was raised to sixty that Dobbs stole into Yossarian's tent while Orr was out looking for gaskets and disclosed the plot he had formulated to murder Colonel Cathcart. He needed Yossarian's assistance.

     "You want us to kill him in cold blood?" Yossarian objected.

     "That's right," Dobbs agreed with an optimistic smile, encouraged by Yossarian's ready grasp of the situation. "We'll shoot him to death with the Luger I brought back from Sicily that nobody knows I've got."

     "I don't think I could do it," Yossarian concluded, after weighing the idea in silence awhile.

     Dobbs was astonished. "Why not?"

     "Look. Nothing would please me more than to have the son of a bitch break his neck or get killed in a crash or to find out that someone else had shot him to death. But I don't think I could kill him."

     "He'd do it to you," Dobbs argued. "In fact, you"re the one who told me he is doing it to us by keeping us in combat so long."

     "But I don't think I could do it to him. He's got a right to live, too, I guess."

     "Not as long as he's trying to rob you and me of our right to live. What's the matter with you?" Dobbs was flabbergasted. "I used to listen to you arguing that same thing with Clevinger. And look what happened to him. Right inside that cloud."

     "Stop shouting, will you?" Yossarian shushed him.

     "I'm not shouting!" Dobbs shouted louder, his face red with revolutionary fervor. His eyes and nostrils were running, and his palpitating crimson lower lip was splattered with a foamy dew. "There must have been close to a hundred men in the group who had finished their fifty-five missions when he raised the number to sixty. There must have been at least another hundred like you with just a couple more to fly. He's going to kill us all if we let him go on forever. We've got to kill him first."

     Yossarian nodded expressionlessly, without committing himself. "Do you think we could get away with it?"

     "I've got it all worked out. I—"

     "Stop shouting, for Christ's sake!"

     "I'm not shouting. I've got it—"

     "Will you stop shouting!"

     "I've got it all worked out," Dobbs whispered, gripping the side of Orr's cot with white-knuckled hands to constrain them from waving. "Thursday morning when He's due back from that goddam farmhouse of his in the hills, I'll sneak up through the woods to that hairpin turn in the road and hide in the bushes. He has to slow down there, and I can watch the road in both directions to make sure there's no one else around. When I see him coming, I'll shove a big log out into the road to make him stop his jeep. Then I'll step out of the bushes with my Luger and shoot him in the head until He's dead. I'll bury the gun, come back down through the woods to the squadron and go about my business just like everybody else. What could possibly go wrong?"

     Yossarian had followed each step attentively. "Where do I come in?" he asked in puzzlement.

     "I couldn't do it without you," Dobbs explained. "I need you to tell me to go ahead."

     Yossarian found it hard to believe him. "Is that all you want me to do? Just tell you to go ahead?"

     "That's all I need from you," Dobbs answered. "Just tell me to go ahead and I'll blow his brains out all by myself the day after tomorrow." His voice was accelerating with emotion and rising again. "I'd like to shoot Colonel Korn in the head, too, while we"re at it, although I'd like to spare Major Danby, if that's all right with you. Then I'd murder Appleby and Havermeyer also, and after we finish murdering Appleby and Havermeyer I'd like to murder McWatt."

     "McWatt?" cried Yossarian, almost jumping up in horror. "McWatt's a friend of mine. What do you want from McWatt?"

     "I don't know," Dobbs confessed with an air of floundering embarrassment. "I just thought that as long as we were murdering Appleby and Havermeyer we might as well murder McWatt too. Don't you want to murder McWatt?"

     Yossarian took a firm stand. "Look, I might keep interested in this if you stop shouting it all over the island and if you stick to killing Colonel Cathcart. But if you"re going to turn this into a blood bath, you can forget about me."

     "All right, all right," Dobbs sought to placate him. "Just Colonel Cathcart. Should I do it? Tell me to go ahead."

     Yossarian shook his head. "I don't think I could tell you to go ahead."

     Dobbs was frantic. "I'm willing to compromise," he pleaded vehemently. "You don't have to tell me to go ahead. Just tell me it's a good idea. Okay? Is it a good idea?"

     Yossarian still shook his head. "It would have been a great idea if you had gone ahead and done it without even speaking to me. Now it's too late. I don't think I can tell you anything. Give me some more time. I might change my mind."

     "Then it will be too late."

     Yossarian kept shaking his head. Dobbs was disappointed. He sat for a moment with a hangdog look, then spurted to his feet suddenly and stamped away to have another impetuous crack at persuading Doc Daneeka to ground him, knocking over Yossarian's washstand with his hip when he lurched around and tripping over the fuel line of the stove Orr was still constructing. Doc Daneeka withstood Dobbs's blustering and gesticulating attack with a series of impatient nods and sent him to the medical tent to describe his symptoms to Gus and Wes, who painted his gums purple with gentian-violet solution the moment he started to talk. They painted his toes purple, too, and forced a laxative down his throat when he opened his mouth again to complain, and then they sent him away.

     Dobbs was in even worse shape than Hungry Joe, who could at least fly missions when he was not having nightmares. Dobbs was almost as bad as Orr, who seemed happy as an undersized, grinning lark with his deranged and galvanic giggle and shivering warped buck teeth and who was sent along for a rest leave with Milo and Yossarian on the trip to Cairo for eggs when Milo bought cotton instead and took off at dawn for Istanbul with his plane packed to the gun turrets with exotic spiders and unripened red bananas. Orr was one of the homeliest freaks Yossarian had ever encountered, and one of the most attractive. He had a raw bulgy face, with hazel eyes squeezing from their sockets like matching brown halves of marbles and thick, wavy particolored hair sloping up to a peak on the top of his head like a pomaded pup tent. Orr was knocked down into the water or had an engine shot out almost every time he went up, and he began jerking on Yossarian's arm like a wild man after they had taken off for Naples and come down in Sicily to find the scheming, cigar-smoking, ten-year-old pimp with the two twelve-year-old virgin sisters waiting for them in town in front of the hotel in which there was room for only Milo. Yossarian pulled back from Orr adamantly, gazing with some concern and bewilderment at Mt. Etna instead of Mt. Vesuvius and wondering what they were doing in Sicily instead of Naples as Orr kept entreating him in a tittering, stuttering, concupiscent turmoil to go along with him behind the scheming ten-year-old pimp to his two twelve-year-old virgin sisters who were not really virgins and not really sisters and who were really only twenty-eight.

     "Go with him," Milo instructed Yossarian laconically. "Remember your mission."

     "All right," Yossarian yielded with a sigh, remembering his mission. "But at least let me try to find a hotel room first so I can get a good night's sleep afterward."

     "You'll get a good night's sleep with the girls," Milo replied with the same air of intrigue. "Remember your mission."

     But they got no sleep at all, for Yossarian and Orr found themselves jammed into the same double bed with the two twelve year-old twenty-eight-year-old prostitutes, who turned out to be oily and obese and who kept waking them up all night long to ask them to switch partners. Yossarian's perceptions were soon so fuzzy that he paid no notice to the beige turban the fat one crowding into him kept wearing until late the next morning when the scheming ten-year-old pimp with the Cuban panatella snatched it off in public in a bestial caprice that exposed in the brilliant Sicilian daylight her shocking, misshapen and denudate skull. Vengeful neighbors had shaved her hair to the gleaming bone because she had slept with Germans. The girl screeched in feminine outrage and waddled comically after the scheming ten-year-old pimp, her grisly, bleak, violated scalp slithering up and down ludicrously around the queer darkened wart of her face like something bleached and obscene. Yossarian had never laid eyes on anything so bare before. The pimp spun the turban high on his finger like a trophy and kept himself skipping inches ahead of her finger tips as he led her in a tantalizing circle around the square congested with people who were howling with laughter and pointing to Yossarian with derision when Milo strode up with a grim look of haste and puckered his lips reprovingly at the unseemly spectacle of so much vice and frivolity. Milo insisted on leaving at once for Malta.

     "We"re sleepy," Orr whined.

     "That's your own fault," Milo censured them both selfrighteously. "If you had spent the night in your hotel room instead of with these immoral girls, you'd both feel as good as I do today."

     "You told us to go with them," Yossarian retorted accusingly. "And we didn't have a hotel room. You were the only one who could get a hotel room."

     "That wasn't my fault, either," Milo explained haughtily. "How was I supposed to know all the buyers would be in town for the chick-pea harvest?"

     "You knew it," Yossarian charged. "That explains why we"re here in Sicily instead of Naples. You"ve probably got the whole damned plane filled with chick-peas already."

     "Shhhhhh!" Milo cautioned sternly, with a meaningful glance toward Orr. "Remember your mission."

     The bomb bay, the rear and tail sections of the plane and most of the top turret gunner's section were all filled with bushels of chick-peas when they arrived at the airfield to take off for Malta.

     Yossarian's mission on the trip was to distract Orr from observing where Milo bought his eggs, even though Orr was a member of Milo's syndicate and, like every other member of Milo's syndicate, owned a share. His mission was silly, Yossarian felt, since it was common knowledge that Milo bought his eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sold them to the mess halls in his syndicate for five cents apiece.

     "I just don't trust him," Milo brooded in the plane, with a backward nod toward Orr, who was curled up like a tangled rope on the low bushels of chick-peas, trying torturedly to sleep. "And I'd just as soon buy my eggs when He's not around to learn my business secrets. What else don't you understand?"

     Yossarian was riding beside him in the co-pilot's seat. "I don't understand why you buy eggs for seven cents apiece in Malta and sell them for five cents."

     "I do it to make a profit."

     "But how can you make a profit? You lose two cents an egg."

     "But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don't make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share."

     Yossarian felt he was beginning to understand. "And the people you sell the eggs to at four and a quarter cents apiece make a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when they sell them back to you at seven cents apiece. Is that right? Why don't you sell the eggs directly to you and eliminate the people you buy them from?"

     "Because I'm the people I buy them from," Milo explained. "I make a profit of three and a quarter cents apiece when I sell them to me and a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when I buy them back from me. That's a total profit of six cents an egg. I lose only two cents an egg when I sell them to the mess halls at five cents apiece, and that's how I can make a profit buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five cents apiece. I pay only one cent apiece at the hen when I buy them in Sicily."

     "In Malta," Yossarian corrected. "You buy your eggs in Malta, not Sicily."

     Milo chortled proudly. "I don't buy eggs in Malta," he confessed, with an air of slight and clandestine amusement that was the only departure from industrious sobriety Yossarian had ever seen him make. "I buy them in Sicily for one cent apiece and transfer them to Malta secretly at four and a half cents apiece in order to get the price of eggs up to seven cents apiece when people come to Malta looking for them."

     "Why do people come to Malta for eggs when they"re so expensive there?"

     "Because they"ve always done it that way."

     "Why don't they look for eggs in Sicily?"

     "Because they"ve never done it that way."

     "Now I really don't understand. Why don't you sell your mess halls the eggs for seven cents apiece instead offor five cents apiece?"

     "Because my mess halls would have no need for me then. Anyone can buy seven-cents-apiece eggs for seven cents apiece."

     "Why don't they bypass you and buy the eggs directly from you in Malta at four and a quarter cents apiece?"

     "Because I wouldn't sell it to them."

     "Why wouldn't you sell it to them?"

     "Because then there wouldn't be as much room for profit. At least this way I can make a bit for myself as a middleman."

     "Then you do make a profit for yourself," Yossarian declared.

     "Of course I do. But it all goes to the syndicate. And everybody has a share. Don't you understand? It's exactly what happens with those plum tomatoes I sell to Colonel Cathcart."

     "Buy," Yossarian corrected him. "You don't sell plum tomatoes to Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. You buy plum tomatoes from them."

     "No, sell," Milo corrected Yossarian. "I distribute my plum tomatoes in markets all over Pianosa under an assumed name so that Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn can buy them up from me under their assumed names at four cents apiece and sell them back to me the next day for the syndicate at five cents apiece. They make a profit of one cent apiece. I make a profit of three and a half cents apiece, and everybody comes out ahead."

     "Everybody but the syndicate," said Yossarian with a snort. "The syndicate is paying five cents apiece for plum tomatoes that cost you only half a cent apiece. How does the syndicate benefit?"

     "The syndicate benefits when I benefit," Milo explained, "because everybody has a share. And the syndicate gets Colonel Cathcart's and Colonel Korn's support so that they'll let me go out on trips like this one. You'll see how much profit that can mean in about fifteen minutes when we land in Palermo."

     " Malta," Yossarian corrected him. "We"re flying to Malta now, not Palermo."

     "No, we"re flying to Palermo," Milo answered. "There's an endive exporter in Palermo I have to see for a minute about a shipment of mushrooms to Bern that were damaged by mold."

     " Milo, how do you do it?" Yossarian inquired with laughing amazement and admiration. "You fill out a flight plan for one place and then you go to another. Don't the people in the control towers ever raise hell?"

     "They all belong to the syndicate," Milo said. "And they know that what's good for the syndicate is good for the country, because that's what makes Sammy run. The men in the control towers have a share, too, and that's why they always have to do whatever they can to help the syndicate."

     "Do I have a share?"

     "Everybody has a share."

     "Does Orr have a share?"

     "Everybody has a share."

     "And Hungry Joe? He has a share, too?"

     "Everybody has a share."

     "Well, I'll be damned," mused Yossarian, deeply impressed with the idea of a share for the very first time.

     Milo turned toward him with a faint glimmer of mischief. "I have a sure-fire plan for cheating the federal government out of six thousand dollars. We can make three thousand dollars apiece without any risk to either of us. Are you interested?"

     "No."

     Milo looked at Yossarian with profound emotion. "That's what I like about you," he exclaimed. "You"re honest! You"re the only one I know that I can really trust. That's why I wish you'd try to be of more help to me. I really was disappointed when you ran off with those two tramps in Catania yesterday."

     Yossarian stared at Milo in quizzical disbelief. " Milo, you told me to go with them. Don't you remember?"

     "That wasn't my fault," Milo answered with dignity. "I had to get rid of Orr some way once we reached town. It will be a lot different in Palermo. When we land in Palermo, I want you and Orr to leave with the girls right from the airport."

     "With what girls?"

     "I radioed ahead and made arrangements with a four-year-old pimp to supply you and Orr with two eight-year-old virgins who are half Spanish. He'll be waiting at the airport in a limousine. Go right in as soon as you step out of the plane."

     "Nothing doing," said Yossarian, shaking his head. "The only place I'm going is to sleep."

     Milo turned livid with indignation, his slim long nose flickering spasmodically between his black eyebrows and his unbalanced orange-brown mustache like the pale, thin flame of a single candle. "Yossarian, remember your mission," he reminded reverently.

     "To hell with my mission," Yossarian responded indifferently. "And to hell with the syndicate too, even though I do have a share. I don't want any eight-year-old virgins, even if they are half Spanish."

     "I don't blame you. But these eight-year-old virgins are really only thirty-two. And they"re not really half Spanish but only one-third Estonian."

     "I don't care for any virgins."

     "And they"re not even virgins," Milo continued persuasively. "The one I picked out for you was married for a short time to an elderly schoolteacher who slept with her only on Sundays, so sHe's really almost as good as new."

     But Orr was sleepy, too, and Yossarian and Orr were both at Milo's side when they rode into the city of Palermo from the airport and discovered that there was no room for the two of them at the hotel there either, and, more important, that Milo was mayor.

     The weird, implausible reception for Milo began at the airfield, where civilian laborers who recognized him halted in their duties respectfully to gaze at him with full expressions of controlled exuberance and adulation. News of his arrival preceded him into the city, and the outskirts were already crowded with cheering citizens as they sped by in their small uncovered truck. Yossarian and Orr were mystified and mute and pressed close against Milo for security.

     Inside the city, the welcome for Milo grew louder as the truck slowed and eased deeper toward the middle of town. Small boys and girls had been released from school and were lining the sidewalks in new clothes, waving tiny flags. Yossarian and Orr were absolutely speechless now. The streets were jammed with joyous throngs, and strung overhead were huge banners bearing Milo's picture. Milo had posed for these pictures in a drab peasant's blouse with a high collar, and his scrupulous, paternal countenance was tolerant, wise, critical and strong as he stared out at the populace omnisciently with his undisciplined mustache and disunited eyes. Sinking invalids blew kisses to him from windows. Aproned shopkeepers cheered ecstatically from the narrow doorways of their shops. Tubas crumped. Here and there a person fell and was trampled to death. Sobbing old women swarmed through each other frantically around the slow-moving truck to touch Milo's shoulder or press his hand. Milo bore the tumultuous celebrations with benevolent grace. He waved back to everyone in elegant reciprocation and showered generous handfuls of foilcovered Hershey kisses to the rejoicing multitudes. Lines of lusty young boys and girls skipped along behind him with their arms linked, chanting in hoarse and glassy-eyed adoration, "Mi-lo! Mi-lo! Mi-lo!"

     Now that his secret was out, Milo relaxed with Yossarian and Orr and inflated opulently with a vast, shy pride. His cheeks turned flesh-colored. Milo had been elected mayor of Palermo —and of nearby Carini, Monreale, Bagheria, Termini Imerese, Cefalu, Mistretta and Nicosia as well—because he had brought Scotch to Sicily.

     Yossarian was amazed. "The people here like to drink Scotch that much?"

     "They don't drink any of the Scotch," Milo explained. "Scotch is very expensive, and these people here are very poor."

     "Then why do you import it to Sicily if nobody drinks any?"

     "To build up a price. I move the Scotch here from Malta to make more room for profit when I sell it back to me for somebody else. I created a whole new industry here. Today Sicily is the third largest exporter of Scotch in the world, and that's why they elected me mayor."

     "How about getting us a hotel room if you"re such a hotshot?" Orr grumbled impertinently in a voice slurred with fatigue.

     Milo responded contritely. "That's just what I'm going to do," he promised. "I'm really sorry about forgetting to radio ahead for hotel rooms for you two. Come along to my office and I'll speak to my deputy mayor about it right now."

     Milo's office was a barbershop, and his deputy mayor was a pudgy barber from whose obsequious lips cordial greetings foamed as effusively as the lather he began whipping up in Milo's shaving cup.

     "Well, Vittorio," said Milo, settling back lazily in one of Vittorio's barber chairs, "how were things in my absence this time?"

     "Very sad, Signor Milo, very sad. But now that you are back, the people are all happy again."

     "I was wondering about the size of the crowds. How come all the hotels are full?"

     "Because so many people from other cities are here to see you, Signor Milo. And because we have all the buyers who have come into town for the artichoke auction."

     Milo's hand soared up perpendicularly like an eagle and arrested Vittorio's shaving brush. "What's artichoke?" he inquired.

     "Artichoke, Signor Milo? An artichoke is a very tasty vegetable that is popular everywhere. You must try some artichokes while you are here, Signor Milo. We grow the best in the world."

     "Really?" said Milo. "How much are artichokes selling for this year?"

     "It looks like a very good year for artichokes. The crops were very bad."

     "Is that a fact?" mused Milo, and was gone, sliding from his chair so swiftly that his striped barber's apron retained his shape for a second or two after he had gone before it collapsed. Milo had vanished from sight by the time Yossarian and Orr rushed after him to the doorway.

     "Next?" barked Milo's deputy mayor officiously. "Who's next?"

     Yossarian and Orr walked from the barbershop in dejection. Deserted by Milo, they trudged homelessly through the reveling masses in futile search of a place to sleep. Yossarian was exhausted. His head throbbed with a dull, debilitating pain, and he was irritable with Orr, who had found two crab apples somewhere and walked with them in his cheeks until Yossarian spied them there and made him take them out. Then Orr found two horse chestnuts somewhere and slipped those in until Yossarian detected them and snapped at him again to take the crab apples out of his mouth. Orr grinned and replied that they were not crab apples but horse chestnuts and that they were not in his mouth but in his hands, but Yossarian was not able to understand a single word he said because of the horse chestnuts in his mouth and made him take them out anyway. A sly light twinkled in Orr's eyes. He rubbed his forehead harshly with his knuckles, like a man in an alcoholic stupor, and snickered lewdly.

     "Do you remember that girl—" He broke off to snicker lewdly again. "Do you remember that girl who was hitting me over the head with that shoe in that apartment in Rome, when we were both naked?" he asked with a look of cunning expectation. He waited until Yossarian nodded cautiously. "If you let me put the chestnuts back in my mouth I'll tell you why she was hitting me. Is that a deal?"

     Yossarian nodded, and Orr told him the whole fantastic story of why the naked girl in Nately's whore's apartment was hitting him over the head with her shoe, but Yossarian was not able to understand a single word because the horse chestnuts were back in his mouth. Yossarian roared with exasperated laughter at the trick, but in the end there was nothing for them to do when night fell but eat a damp dinner in a dirty restaurant and hitch a ride back to the airfield, where they slept on the chill metal floor of the plane and turned and tossed in groaning torment until the truck drivers blasted up less than two hours later with their crates of artichokes and chased them out onto the ground while they filled up the plane. A heavy rain began falling. Yossarian and Orr were dripping wet by the time the trucks drove away and had no choice but to squeeze themselves back into the plane and roll themselves up like shivering anchovies between the jolting corners of the crates of artichokes that Milo flew up to Naples at dawn and exchanged for the cinnamon sticks, cloves, vanilla beans and pepper pods that he rushed right back down south with that same day to Malta, where, it turned out, he was Assistant Governor-General. There was no room for Yossarian and Orr in Malta either. Milo was Major Sir Milo Minderbinder in Malta and had a gigantic office in the governor-general's building. His mahogany desk was immense. In a panel of the oak wall, between crossed British flags, hung a dramatic arresting photograph of Major Sir Milo Minderbinder in the dress uniform of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. His mustache in the photograph was clipped and narrow, his chin was chiseled, and his eyes were sharp as thorns. Milo had been knighted, commissioned a major in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and named Assistant Governor-General of Malta because he had brought the egg trade there. He gave Yossarian and Orr generous permission to spend the night on the thick carpet in his office, but shortly after he left a sentry in battle dress appeared and drove them from the building at the tip of his bayonet, and they rode out exhaustedly to the airport with a surly cab driver, who overcharged them, and went to sleep inside the plane again, which was filled now with leaking gunny sacks of cocoa and freshly ground coffee and reeking with an odor so rich that they were both outside retching violently against the landing gear when Milo was chauffeured up the first thing the next morning, looking fit as a fiddle, and took right off for Oran, where there was again no room at the hotel for Yossarian and Orr, and where Milo was Vice-Shah. Milo had at his disposal sumptuous quarters inside a salmon-pink palace, but Yossarian and Orr were not allowed to accompany him inside because they were Christian infidels. They were stopped at the gates by gargantuan Berber guards with scimitars and chased away. Orr was snuffling and sneezing with a crippling head cold. Yossarian's broad back was bent and aching. He was ready to break Milo's neck, but Milo was Vice-Shah of Oran and his person was sacred. Milo was not only the Vice-Shah of Oran, as it turned out, but also the Caliph of Baghdad, the Imam of Damascus, and the Sheik of Araby. Milo was the corn god, the rain god and the rice god in backward regions where such crude gods were still worshiped by ignorant and superstitious people, and deep inside the jungles of Africa, he intimated with becoming modesty, large graven images of his mustached face could be found overlooking primitive stone altars red with human blood. Everywhere they touched he was acclaimed with honor, and it was one triumphal ovation after another for him in city after city until they finally doubled back through the Middle East and reached Cairo, where Milo cornered the market on cotton that no one else in the world wanted and brought himself promptly to the brink of ruin. In Cairo there was at last room at the hotel for Yossarian and Orr. There were soft beds for them with fat fluffed-up pillows and clean, crisp sheets. There were closets with hangers for their clothes. There was water to wash with. Yossarian and Orr soaked their rancid, unfriendly bodies pink in a steaming-hot tub and then went from the hotel with Milo to eat shrimp cocktails and filet mignon in a very fine restaurant with a stock ticker in the lobby that happened to be clicking out the latest quotation for Egyptian cotton when Milo inquired of the captain of waiters what kind of machine it was. Milo had never imagined a machine so beautiful as a stock ticker before.

     "Really?" he exclaimed when the captain of waiters had finished his explanation. "And how much is Egyptian cotton selling for?" The captain of waiters told him, and Milo bought the whole crop.

     But Yossarian was not nearly so frightened by the Egyptian cotton Milo bought as he was by the bunches of green red bananas Milo had spotted in the native market place as they drove into the city, and his fears proved justified, for Milo shook him awake out of a deep sleep just after twelve and shoved a partly peeled banana toward him. Yossarian choked back a sob.

     "Taste it," Milo urged, following Yossarian's writhing face around with the banana insistently.

     "Milo, you bastard," moaned Yossarian, "I've got to get some sleep."

     "Eat it and tell me if it's good," Milo persevered. "Don't tell Orr I gave it to you. I charged him two piasters for his."

     Yossarian ate the banana submissively and closed his eyes after telling Milo it was good, but Milo shook him awake again and instructed him to get dressed as quickly as he could, because they were leaving at once for Pianosa.

     "You and Orr have to load the bananas into the plane right away," he explained. "The man said to watch out for spiders while you"re handling the bunches."

     " Milo, can't we wait until morning?" Yossarian pleaded. "I've got to get some sleep."

     "They"re ripening very quickly," answered Milo, "and we don't have a minute to lose. Just think how happy the men back at the squadron will be when they get these bananas."

     But the men back at the squadron never even saw any of the bananas, for it was a seller's market for bananas in Istanbul and a buyer's market in Beirut for the caraway seeds Milo rushed with to Bengasi after selling the bananas, and when they raced back into Pianosa breathlessly six days later at the conclusion of Orr's rest leave, it was with a load of best white eggs from Sicily that Milo said were from Egypt and sold to his mess halls for only four cents apiece so that all the commanding officers in his syndicate would implore him to speed right back to Cairo for more bunches of green red bananas to sell in Turkey for the caraway seeds in demand in Bengasi. And everybody had a share.



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Paranoia Strikes Deep, Paul Krugman, Nov. 9 2009.

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.



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The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter†, 1964.

Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:

As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America.…For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose.…Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.

Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:

... It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.…The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States.…These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here. ...

These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

Illuminism and Masonry

I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.

Americans first learned of Illumism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed “for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE.” It had become “one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe.” And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion—a secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face,” and a device that sounds like a stench bomb—a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”

These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.

The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statement who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.

As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.

Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, is was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so “muzzled” by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.

Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man.…It may truly be said to be HELL'S MASTER PIECE.”

The Jesuit Threat

Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.

Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in operation…we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government: “Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here.…She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.

“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,

that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.

Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done quickly.…” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.”

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The Paranoid Style in Action

The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor,…The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs.…

The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin…said an “avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)

Birch official John Rousselot said, ”We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”

—San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964

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Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,* the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.

Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.

Why They Feel Dispossessed

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower., secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall was the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not “just happen”; it was “brought about, step by step, by will and intention,” the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that “Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government”—note the care and scrupulousness of that “almost.” He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history n which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”

Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. “For many reasons and after a lot of study,” he wrote some years ago, “I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent.” The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.” Eisenhower’s brother Milton was “actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party.” As for Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer famous, as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—a conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”

Emulating the Enemy

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.* Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Renegades and Pedants

A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.

The Double Sufferer

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

Richard Hofstadter is DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His latest book, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction earlier this year. This essay is adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.

* Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason who invited “having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun.”

* In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.” Shadegg comments: “ In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung.” “I would suggest,” writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? “that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.