Eugène Ionesco tried to warn us
Because my dad also had a part, I stayed each night until the end. Between performances and rehearsals, I think I saw the play at least a dozen times. It left a deep and lasting impression on me.
The plot is as follows: One day in a quiet French village, people suddenly and inexplicably begin turning into rhinoceroses. At first, the villagers are shocked and outraged. Something must be done! But almost immediately, they change their minds and go from condemning rhinoceroses to becoming them. Only Bérenger, a slovenly minor government official given to drink and ennui, resists. At play's end, he is the literal last man, surrounded by rampaging pachyderms who were once his friends, colleagues, and neighbors.
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'People who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end!' Bérenger tells the audience as he stands alone and bereft on stage at the end.
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The play sounds unrelentingly dark and depressing, but it is actually quite funny. I recall big laughs at certain moments. The biggest came when the village's most vocal opponent of rhinocerization announces his reason for reversing himself and joining the herd: 'We must move with the times!'
So what is this odd seriocomic play about? Fascism, my father explained to me — specifically the cowardice and expediency otherwise intelligent and reasonable people showed as they either joined or acquiesced to the Nazis.
Dad knew what he was talking about. As a boy in Nazi Germany, he had witnessed the very behavior the play satirizes.
Ionesco, an impish, sad-faced Romanian who lived most of his life in France, confirmed this, saying he based 'Rhinocéros' on his experiences in prewar Romania during the rise of the Iron Guard, that nation's fascist movement. But he also emphasized it wasn't just about Nazis. The play is a full-throated condemnation of authoritarianism and groupthink in all its forms, he said.
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Eugène Ionesco photographed in the 1950s.
Wikimedia Commons
'Of course the rhinoceroses are the Nazis, but they are also the Communists, the Stalinists, totalitarians in general,' Ionesco said in
is about: conformity.'
I have never forgotten the lessons I took away from 'Rhinocéros':
Never blindly follow anyone or anything, especially the crowd. Always be skeptical. Always ask questions. Always think for yourself.
In recent years as I have witnessed the steady erosion of American democracy, my mind has repeatedly returned to 'Rhinocéros
.
'
I've often felt as if I were watching a demented production of the play writ large as individual after individual, institution after institution, has caved to Donald Trump and his authoritarian MAGA movement. That feeling has accelerated massively since Trump took office for the second time and he and his henchman Elon Musk began ruling by decree with nary a peep of protest from their fellow Republicans.
It's uncanny how closely the arc of the Republican party over the last decade has followed that of the villagers in 'Rhinocéros
.
'
Like them, GOP officeholders and institutions initially reacted to Trump's rise with disgust and revulsion. Also like them, they demanded something be done to stop him. But suddenly, often virtually overnight, they changed their minds.
Just as with the villagers in the play, this was the moment when bumps, the first sign of a horn, began appearing on Republicans' heads and their skin started turning leathery and green. It was only a matter of time before these once harsh critics of Trump and his movement became full-fledged rhinoceroses, grunting their undying fealty to him and his ideas, no matter how deranged or anti-democratic.
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Even the language of Trumpism eerily tracks that of the play. 'I never believe journalists. They are all liars,' says one character of newspaper reports about the sudden appearance of rhinoceroses in the village. 'Humanism is all washed up! You're a ridiculous old sentimentalist!' declares another. 'Moral standards, I'm sick of moral standards!.... We need to go beyond moral standards,' says the same character a short time later.
'Rhinocéros' also reflects the degradation of language that is a prerequisite for authoritarianism and groupthink. In the first act, before the villagers fully grasp what is happening, the characters repeatedly contradict themselves or make nonsensical statements, an indication that the groundwork has been laid for what is coming. The apogee comes when the character of the Logician gives the Old Gentleman — the part my father played back in 1971 — an example of a syllogism. Cats, this supposed scholar says, have four legs. Since two neighborhood felines have four legs, they must be cats, he reasons.
The Old Gentleman responds that his dog has four legs, which leads the Logician to conclude his dog is actually a cat. 'But the contrary is also true,' he adds.
'Logic is a beautiful thing,' the Old Gentleman says.
'As long as it's not abused,' the Logician replies.
Reading the above is like listening to Trump at one of his rallies.
Naming the biggest rhinoceros of the last decade is a daunting task — there are more contenders than NBA playoff spots — but Vice President JD Vance has to be at or near the top of the list. When Trump burst onto the national scene, the 'Hillbilly Elegy' author said he couldn't decide if Donald Trump was 'a cynical a-hole' or 'America's Hitler' and called him 'reprehensible' and 'an idiot.'
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But then the baby-faced Yale Law graduate decided to run for Senate, and he transmogrified into a raging MAGA rhinoceros parroting every last nostrum of Trumpism like a ventriloquist's dummy.
Another leading contender is South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who once called Trump a 'kook,' 'crazy,' and 'unfit for office,' only to become one of his chief sycophants and enablers.
Then there's former Florida senator Marco Rubio, now Trump's secretary of state, who said of his future boss in 2016, 'He's a con artist. He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy,' before degenerating into a fatuous MAGA fanboy.
Like the formerly vehement opponent of rhinocerization in the play, these three, along with countless others, decided they 'must move with the times.'
But it isn't just Republicans who have succumbed to rhinocerization. Conformity has also infected big chunks of the Democratic Party as well as much of higher education, publishing, Hollywood, elite journalism, liberal advocacy organizations, nonprofits and NGOs, and the left-leaning intelligentsia. Faced with demands from progressive activists following George Floyd's 2020 murder to incorporate antiracism and ancillary ideas about sex and gender into every aspect of their operations and thinking, these groups and individuals folded faster than the villagers in 'Rhinocéros.'
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That has created in many liberal venues a stifling and censorious atmosphere. Even the slightest deviation from the new orthodoxy is called out by online mobs. The reaction of most of the nation's liberal establishment has been self-rhinocerization — acquiescence to the new ideology.
This has produced absurdities like the presidents of some of our most prestigious universities saying calls for genocide are acceptable speech on campus, even as they allowed critics of antiracism to be squished like bugs; and Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declining at her confirmation hearing to define the word 'woman.' The reason Jackson, a magna sum laude graduate of Harvard College, gave for being unable to state a meaning for one of the simplest and most common words in the English language could have come straight out of 'Rhinocéros': 'I'm not a biologist.'
'Rhinocéros' once enjoyed wide acclaim, earning Ionesco a 10-minute ovation at its 1959 premiere and going to the London stage and Broadway, where it won a Tony. It inspired a not-very-good 1973 movie adaptation and entered the Hebrew language in the form of 'rhinocerization,' meaning being unduly persuaded by nationalism or other passion.
As memories of the horrors of 20th-century authoritarianism have faded, so too has the popularity of 'Rhinocéros.' But it is the perfect play for the conformity and cowardice of our times.
'Rhinocéros' tells where we are and how we got there. Things may appear dark, but the play's ending provides solace and inspiration. At the last moment, Bérenger snaps out of his despair and vows defiance.
'I'll put up a fight against the lot of them, the whole lot of them!' a solitary and abandoned Bérenger says in the play's closing lines. 'I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end! I'm not capitulating!'
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