The catch-22 of Barack Obama

In that moment, director Mike Nichols, who died this week, leaving a gaping hole in America’s cultural landscape, offered an image to echo, underscore, and bring to life his bewildered hero’s words: War is lunacy. Even the definition of lunacy in war is lunacy: If you thought war was crazy, then you were clearly sane enough that you couldn’t be grounded for being crazy. If you flew your missions, then you were clearly crazy and you shouldn’t be flying them, but the minute you asked to stop because you were crazy, then you were sane and had to fly again.

If only a man who could bring such twisted logic to life like Nichols did had lived long enough to make a really good film about the tragic absurdity of the relationship between the current president of the United States and his counterparts on Capitol Hill. The rest of Nichols’s work suggests he would have been the right guy to make such a film. Who could capture the interwoven drama and pathos of the posturing and dysfunction like the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the gravity of the stakes like the director of Angels in America, or the hilarity of the nonstop foolishness and political slapstick like the director of The Birdcage? Surely Nichols would see the potential in something that might at times seem like a remake of his classic version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple — this time starring U.S. President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.

Having said that, maybe Nichols already did all that he needed to illustrate the perversity of the situation in which Barack Obama found himself yet again this week — the perversity that framed his announcement of plans to indefinitely postpone enforcing immigration laws that could have led to the deportation of perhaps 5 million illegal residents of the United States. Maybe, in retrospect, Nichols did all he needed to while making the underloved film Catch-22, the movie based on Joseph Heller’s genuinely great book. Because with an obstructionist Congress like the one Obama faces, the president can never win.