A long time ago (1959) in a land far, far away (France) a playwright named Eugène Ionesco wrote The Rhinoceros. In the play, the citizens of a provincial French village turn into rhinoceroses. The most common interpretation of the play is the Nazi takeover of France in the 1930s. The Rhinocerisation of the citizenry in the play symbolizes that takeover. When I was watching TV news last night, I had the weird sense that the United States is currently undergoing its own process of rhinocerisalion. While we watch our friends and neighbors become rhinos, we exclaim the equivalent of the “Quelle bizarre” (“how strange”) uttered by the village citizens not yet turned into rhinos.
“The Rhinoceros” is considered an example of Theater of the Absurd, which was popular in the 1950s—after the madness of World War Two. Not long after, the movie King of Hearts, which is set in the period following WWI, another of humanity’s major mistakes. It focuses on lunatics who escape their asylum and take over a town after the “normal” residents have fled. War is madness, and the most sane people are those in the asylum.
The madness can, of course, happen here. The rule is that Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Humans are well-known for exhibiting herd mentality. Since ancient times, people have formed tribes and followed the tribal chieftain. Militaries are formed on that model: privates report to sergeants, sergeants report to lieutenants, lieutenants, report to captains, captains report to majors, majors report to colonels, and colonels report to generals. Generals, of course, report to the Commander in Chief. Business organizations also follow that model, and even academic institutions are designed to follow that plan.
We repeat the madness of generations that have gone before. We didn’t learn from WWI, so we had WWII. But we all know by now that even the carnage from that war wasn’t enough to convince people to avoid future wars. It seems as though every perceived a threat starts the process of metamorphosing humans into rhinoceroses. One of the things about rhinos is that they have terrible vision. If they can’t see it, they can’t see it, and that perhaps accounts for their short-sightedness in other ways.
WWI was called the war to end all wars. We now know, of course, that it didn’t work out that way. “Rhino vision” is probably the cause of that. When a rhino perceives a threat, it charges, and in charging, it can’t tell the difference between a human and a tree. Rhinos do the best they can with what they know, and the same is true with citizens who have turned into rhinos. The same is true, of course, for the proverbial bull in a china shop. The bull breaks things, not so much by design as by accident. And if we happen to have a rhino in the china shop, the damage would be more by accident than by design. Neither bulls nor rhinos appreciate the finer things in life. We also have to remmber that, if the bull is in the china shop, we let it in. Like the snake, in the song by that name, we knew it was a bull before we let it in:
The question is what do you do with a rhino once it is in the china shop and has given birth to numerous other rhinos, who will soon be looking for shops of their own? The elected rhino handlers thought that they could keep things under control, but it is increasingly evident that they no control over the extent of the damage. Rhinos are just too big and destructive to be controlled. The elected rhino handlers are simply grabbing any assets they can and fleeing the shop. We have perhaps begun the US equivalent of Kristallnacht, and only the rhinos will be spared. Given all the little rhinos that have spawned, I’m not sure we have much opportunity to avoid total destruction of our china shop.
We need to remember that we knew what he was before we took him in, so the question becomes, “Did we learn the lesson this time, or will we have to repeat the cycle again and again because snakes and rhinos don’t always look the same?
