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Heller's Greed Quotes

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Heller emphasizes the greed, hypocrisy and mercenary ideological adaptation of businessmen in a satirical attack on capitalism, ultimately suggesting that American capitalists only succeed materially by limiting the individuality of themselves and of others. Frederick R. Karl, when describing the appeal of Catch-22, wrote: “It appeals to the businessman, who does not really believe that his empire primarily serves the public good” (Karl). The center of Heller’s satirical take on unregulated, capitalist greed is Milo Minderbinder, a character who increases in power, pathology, and moral bankruptcy until his “syndicate” launches an attack on his own men to uphold a trade contract. Even when Milo’s exploits are limited in scale, Heller makes …show more content…

In fact, Milo will often take both of an issue’s opposing stances within a single paragraph, producing utterly ridiculous quotes that contradict each other to persuade and tempt from every possible angle. “‘Shame on you!...Bribery is against the law, and you know it. But it’s not against the law to make a profit, is it? So it can’t be against the law for me to bribe someone in order to make a fair profit, can it?’” (265). A rather on-the-nose image (just before the Pianosa bombing) sees Milo appropriating military aircraft and painting over the slogans of the squadrons: “such laudable ideals as Courage, Might, Justice, Truth, Liberty, Love, Honor and Patriotism that were painted out at once by Milo’s mechanical stencils with a double coat of flat white and replaced in garish purple with the stenciled name M & M ENTERPRISES, FINE FRUITS AND PRODUCE” (253).” Heller satirizes the manipulation of those “laudable ideals” elsewhere in the novel, but Milo’s stenciling creates a bathos that reflects the mutual exclusion between greed and values. Furthermore, it suggests that an America that encourages wanton commercial climbing has no capacity for values - otherwise, why would the Air Force so easily allow their “ideals” to be

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