"But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents"
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Heller’s genius is to make an unspeakable institution sound like it’s being pitched in a deadpan brochure. “But that was war” lands like a shrug, not a drumroll: a moral catastrophe introduced with the casual tone of someone commenting on the weather. The sentence performs the very numbness it indicts. War is so normalized in the machinery of modern life that it can be weighed in the same mental scale as salary and childcare.
The “paid well” bit is the first knife. It reduces patriotic sacrifice to payroll, exposing how easily lofty rhetoric collapses into incentives and careerism. Heller isn’t claiming soldiers are greedy; he’s mocking a system that asks people to risk annihilation and then pretends the transaction is noble rather than transactional.
Then he twists harder: war “liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.” The word “pernicious” is doing savage work. It’s the kind of adjective you’d expect in a moral panic about corrupting books, not in a defense of bombing campaigns. Heller is skewering the way societies rationalize violence by laundering it through “benefits” that sound vaguely progressive: independence, maturity, escape from provincial families. If war can be framed as youth emancipation, anything can be framed as a social good.
Contextually, this sits in Heller’s Catch-22 universe where institutions speak in euphemisms and circular logic until cruelty becomes administrative. The subtext isn’t merely antiwar; it’s anti-justification. Heller shows how absurdity becomes a coping mechanism for people trapped inside systems that demand they call horror a bargain.
The “paid well” bit is the first knife. It reduces patriotic sacrifice to payroll, exposing how easily lofty rhetoric collapses into incentives and careerism. Heller isn’t claiming soldiers are greedy; he’s mocking a system that asks people to risk annihilation and then pretends the transaction is noble rather than transactional.
Then he twists harder: war “liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.” The word “pernicious” is doing savage work. It’s the kind of adjective you’d expect in a moral panic about corrupting books, not in a defense of bombing campaigns. Heller is skewering the way societies rationalize violence by laundering it through “benefits” that sound vaguely progressive: independence, maturity, escape from provincial families. If war can be framed as youth emancipation, anything can be framed as a social good.
Contextually, this sits in Heller’s Catch-22 universe where institutions speak in euphemisms and circular logic until cruelty becomes administrative. The subtext isn’t merely antiwar; it’s anti-justification. Heller shows how absurdity becomes a coping mechanism for people trapped inside systems that demand they call horror a bargain.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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