Rich Horton at Blue Crab Boulevard links to this story about a woman in Japan who sneaked into a guy’s apartment, made a living space for herself above his closet, and lived there for a year before being discovered.

If that doesn’t get made into a movie (at least for cable) somebody isn’t paying attention.

Phil linked yesterday to a list of “cult books.” When I commented, the subject of Catch-22 came up. Which led me to think about the little I’ve read of Joseph Heller’s work.

It adds up to two things—Catch-22 and his play, “We Bombed In New Haven.”

Catch-22 (as far as I recall, for those of you who’ve had better things to do with your lives than read it) is a surrealist satire on military life in World War II. The central point of the story is that when you go to war, people try to kill you. Therefore you shouldn’t go to war. It’s a pacifist argument without even the nobility of very much concern about the lives of others. The main character is primarily interested in staying alive himself.

Therefore, Europe should be surrendered to the Nazis, and all the Jews should die. (That part isn’t actually spelled out, because what is Leftism about other than ignoring any facts that don’t fit into the Pretty Picture? And thinking up bad names for people who try to call your attention to those facts, of course.)

You’re even less likely to be familiar with the play, “We Bombed In New Haven.” I don’t think it’s performed much anymore, for the same reason Stalin’s old comrades used to disappear regularly. They were part of the Glorious Struggle once, but they failed to keep up with current orthodoxy.

I was in my second year of college when some theater people approached me, asking me to play a role in an off-campus production of “We Bombed.” “There’s a part in there that was written for you,” they told me.

So I read the script.

The show’s gimmick is that the story (which is about the U.S. Air Force) and the actual play production are conflated. So you’re always supposed to be aware that these are actors playing roles, and the actors “break proscenium” now and then to talk to you in their own voices. (Sort of. Assuming they all talk like Joseph Heller in their real lives.) You see, that way, when they say, “We bombed in New Haven,” it not only means that the show’s out-of-town try-out in Connecticut was unsuccessful, but that the U.S. Air Force actually obliterated the town! Hilarity ensues.

I told the theater people that I really didn’t feel I could do the play. “My fight isn’t your fight,” I told one of them.

“Oh, I think we’re all after the same things,” he answered.

I told him I didn’t think so. I never did learn what part was written for me.

Now all this military-bashing goes over pretty well with the Left, so you’d think a play like this, written by the legendary Heller, would be a classic and a staple of college dramatic programs everywhere.

But alas, Heller didn’t anticipate the dynamic orthodoxy of the future.

Because one of the running themes in the play concerns smoking.

The bad, inflexible, heartless military commander forbids it on base.

The sympathetic characters all smoke in secret.

So, as you can understand, “We Bombed In New Haven” is quietly being consigned to the attic.

It puts me in mind of Martin Olaf Sabo, formerly my congressman and perhaps the last politician in America to use Scandinavian-American ethnicity as a campaign tactic.

When I was finishing up school at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, the student newspaper interviewed him. He was (is) an alumnus.

He said proudly that he liked to tell people that the first political involvement of his life was organizing a petition to get ashtrays placed in the Student Center.

Oops.