Joseph Heller’s Truth-Telling

 

 

Writer Joseph Heller penned a wonderful quote more than six decades ago, in Catch-22, published in 1961. It’s as timelessly accurate today as back then. Perhaps, even more so.

I’ve taken one his most famous paragraphs, reworked it a bit, and came up with this:

“Insanity is contagious. It’s no trick at all to turn virtue into vice, truth into slander, abstinence into impotence, humility into arrogance, philanthropy into plunder, honor into thievery, wisdom into blasphemy, patriotism into brutality, justice into sadism, and blatant lies into some twisted forgery of truth.”

 

Since the author died in 1999, I doubt Joseph Heller ever met Donald Trump. He couldn’t have possibly foreseen the later horrors this man would heap upon our collective consciousness. Nonetheless, every word and thought sticks to Trumpism like tar on the American road to mass MAGA perdition.