aturday Evening Post. His strategy is to raise thenumber of missions his men must fly before being released from combat - from forty-five to seventy to eighty in the course of the book, but he will gladly go onraising the number to 6000, if that's what it takes to impress the generals (p. 211). What all those in the hierarchy do is to aspire. As Lt. Colonel Korn, Cathcart'snemesis, puts it, 'Everyone teaches us to aspire to higher things. A general is higher than a colonel, and a colonel is higher than a lieutenant colonel. So we're bothaspiring' (p. 415). The way to succeed is to humiliate, dominate and put down others, an approach exquisitely exemplified in Captain Black's perpetual endeavours to get people toconsume themselves with envy or, as he puts it, eat their livers (pp. 110, 395). Persecution is rampant, the more pointless the better, as are blackmail, intimidation,caprice and malice. The best persecution of all is, of course, to endanger people to the point of death by raising the number of missions. But, as Black shows, youcan persecute people about anything. Take the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade. People had to swear allegiance and disclaim communism to get a knife, fork, spoon,food, but the main point was not to allow Major Major to sign, so he could be ostracised. Black's bile was because Major Major had been made SquadronCommander when Black wanted to be. So everyone had to suffer continuous harassment to indulge Black's spite. It took the fearsome authority of Major _____ deCoverly, a man whose one-eyed gaze frightened all, so much so that none could ask his Christian name, to put an end to the paranoid, frenzied excesses of thecrusade (pp. 112-15).Major Major only became a major because an IBM machine had 'a sense of humor almost as keen as his father's' (p. 85), whose sadism had killed the boy'smother and blighted his son's life. Major Major Major was hated by all for his nonconformity, which consisted of being good, ...
