Egyptian cotton
Egyptian cotton is the commodity that nearly destroys Milo Minderbinder's M & M Enterprises and drives him to bomb his own squadron. Milo's impulsive purchase of the entire Egyptian cotton crop, made after seeing a stock ticker in a Cairo restaurant, triggers a financial crisis that exposes the absurd logic of his syndicate and the moral vacuum at the heart of his profit-driven war economy.
Acquisition and Immediate Crisis
Milo buys the whole Egyptian cotton harvest in Cairo after a headwaiter explains a stock ticker to him. The purchase is made on a whim: Milo asks the current quotation, and the next thing Yossarian knows, Milo has bought the entire crop. The mess halls in his syndicate refuse to help, rising up in uncompromising rebellion against his proposal to tax them on a per capita basis so that every man can own a share of the cotton. Even his reliable German allies prefer ersatz. The cotton piles up on the piers in Alexandria, Egypt, and new bales keep arriving daily. Warehousing costs skyrocket, devastating Milo's cash reserves. The profits from the Orvieto mission are sucked away. Milo begins writing home for the money he had sent back in better days; soon that is almost gone.
Desperate Measures and Moral Collapse
Unable to unload the cotton, Milo resorts to increasingly extreme schemes. He tries to make the mess halls feed chocolate-covered cotton to the men, but Yossarian gags on it and points out that it is indigestible. Milo admits he tried living on it himself and it made him sick. When the mess halls still refuse to buy, Milo contracts with the Germans to bomb his own outfit. His planes bomb the fuel stocks, ordnance dump, repair hangars, and B-25 bombers on the hardstands. They bomb all four squadrons, the officers' club, and the Group Headquarters building. Wounded men scream everywhere. Milo is all washed up until he opens his books to the public and discloses the tremendous profit he made. He can reimburse the government for all the people and property he destroyed and still have enough money left over to continue buying Egyptian cotton. Everybody, of course, owns a share. The sweetest part, Milo explains, is that there is really no need to reimburse the government at all: "In a democracy, the government is the people. We're people, aren't we? So we might as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman."
The Cotton as Symbol and Consequence
The Egyptian cotton becomes a symbol of Milo's amoral capitalism, where profit justifies any atrocity. The cotton also directly causes suffering: Milo steals the carbon dioxide cylinders from Mae West life jackets to make ice-cream sodas, replacing them with notes reading "What's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country." When Orr ditches his plane, the life jackets fail to inflate, and the crew nearly drowns. The same theft of morphine from first-aid kits—replaced by a note signed by Milo—leaves Snowden to die in agony over Avignon without pain relief. Yossarian finds only Milo's note and a bottle of aspirin in the kit. The cotton thus links Milo's financial greed directly to the preventable deaths of his comrades.
Resolution and Persistence
Milo eventually bribes the government to buy the cotton, following Yossarian's cynical advice to "make the bribe big enough and they'll find you." The cotton crisis is resolved not by any moral reckoning but by the same corrupt logic that created it. Milo's syndicate survives, and he continues to expand his operations, merging with ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen and making Colonel Cathcart a vice-president. The Egyptian cotton episode demonstrates that in Milo's world, any disaster can be turned into profit as long as everyone has a share.
