Good Evening:
I read Eugene Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros” over the weekend—or maybe I reread it. I am told I saw it once many years ago. If so, my memory of it was dim.
I picked up the play because of a conversation I had on the Bulwark Podcast with the estimable Charlie Sykes a couple of weeks ago in which the subject of Ionesco’s play came up.
It is astonishing how good a metaphor the play is for the allure of Trumpism to apparently sensible people.
The play was written in 1959 as a meditation on how people succumb to propaganda—turning suddenly to fascism or communism. In it, people in a small French provincial town start spontaneously turning into rhinoceroses. The main character watches as one after another of his friends and colleagues—people who were moments earlier fiercely opposed to the rhino transformation trend—suddenly morph.
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