If ever there was a character who managed to be memorable without inspiring many specific memories, it would have to be Major Major Major Major from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. (I enjoyed the book immensely, but mostly only remember Major Major’s tragic haplessness.) Heller’s ridiculously clasic novel also proved to be quite prescient, as Atrios noted:

From Catch-22.

Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged indi­vid­u­al­ist who held that fed­er­al aid to any­one but farm­ers was creep­ing social­ism. He advo­cat­ed thrift and hard work and dis­ap­proved of loose women who turned him down. His spe­cial­ty was alfal­fa, and he made a good thing out of not grow­ing any. The gov­ern­ment paid him well for every bushel of alfal­fa he did not grow. The more alfal­fa he did not grow, the more money the gov­ern­ment gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfal­fa he did not pro­duce. Major Major’s father worked with­out rest at not grow­ing alfal­fa. On long win­ter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend har­ness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make cer­tain that the chores would not be done. He invest­ed in land wise­ly and soon was not grow­ing more alfal­fa than any other man in the coun­ty. Neigh­bors sought him out for advice on all sub­jects, for he had made much money and was there­fore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he coun­seled one and all, and every­one said, “Amen.”

Major Major’s father was an out­spo­ken cham­pi­on of econ­o­my in gov­ern­ment, pro­vid­ed it did not inter­fere with the sacred duty of gov­ern­ment to pay farm­ers as much as they could get for all the alfal­fa they pro­duced that no one else want­ed or for not pro­duc­ing any alfal­fa at all. He was a proud and inde­pen­dent man who was opposed to unem­ploy­ment insur­ance and never hes­i­tat­ed to whine, whim­per, whee­dle and extort for as much as he could get from whomev­er he could.

Our pol­i­tics never changes.