Rhino Ascending

I’ve been trying to write since the apocalection*, but I never seem to have the spirit for it. Seeing what is essentially a modern version of fascism ascend to the presidency of the US will, I suspect, be a political disaster unrivalled in US and European postwar politics.

I’ll try to write more on that later.

In the meantime, as normalisation creeps in, the always excellent Teju Cole has an amazing, short piece in response to the presidential election. He uses the delightful think-piece play The Rhinocerus by Eugene Ionesco to illustrate the concept. The mind backs away from the pain of recognizing what is in front of one’s eyes. Normalisation is what happens to prevent that.

Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.

* apocaleption (n.): an apocalyptic election result. See Trump, Donald J.