Professor Debra Caplan (Fine and Performing Arts) composed a Twitter thread comparing anti-mask sentiment to the mentality depicted in Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros. The tweets received 35,000 likes and 11,000 retweets, with a reach of 5 million impressions.
“In 1959, Eugene Ionesco wrote the absurdist play Rhinoceros in which one by one, an entire town of people suddenly transform into rhinos,” she tweeted. “At first, people are horrified but as the contagion spreads, (almost) everyone comes to accept that turning into a rhinoceros is fine. Rhinoceros is a play about conformity and mob mentality and mass delusion, about how easy it is for people to accept outrageous/unacceptable things simply because everyone else is doing it.”
In an interview with Alternet, she said: “Ionesco’s protagonist faces the same moral conundrum many Americans are now facing amid the ongoing pandemic. It’s crazy to turn into a rhinoceros. His protagonist feels crazy when he doesn’t. It’s crazy to take your mask off. Yet you feel crazy when you don’t.”
Congrats! Well said. . . . and sadly also true for Baruch. Members of the community who are still concerned and feel vulnerable are left in the dust, with happy hours and get-togethers conceived for only one group it seems, at the exclusion of the other. Yet, alternatives would be possible; e.g., by having events outside or finding other ways to include all.