Who's still with us? Anybody? Or have we all gone rhino?

Please stand by. A wonderful playwright is in the wings...and if we take him at his words, we're apt to find that fiction (surely his fiction) is fact, even truth.

News item: Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, of Likud, former mayor of Jerusalem and a staunch advocate for an indivisible Israel until about a minute ago, has suddenly changed into somebody, or something, else. He's calling for unilateral Israeli withdrawal from almost all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

From Eugene Ionesco's play Rhinoceros of some 50 years ago: "I suppose I might as well tell you...it's really rather funny...the fact is, he turned into a rhinoceros."

To which the central character, Berenger, responds: "A rhinoceros!!!! Mr. Papillon a rhinoceros! I can't believe it! I don't think it's funny at all! Why didn't you tell me before?"

So it goes from Ionesco, master of the Absurd (along with Samuel Beckett), and there is hardly a drama as prophetic and as timely as this. Rhinoceros is about a place where suddenly, a rhino appears, another, then another, and then it's thousands of them. As they grow in number, they trample, stampede and terrorize.

At first, the citizens resist the temptation of trafficking with beastly terrorism, but soon they empathize with depravity, for "to understand is to justify." One by one, individual by individual, the citizens begin to change color, shape and substance. They join the herd. They become rhinoceroses.

All except one man, Berenger, the hero. Berenger, and only Berenger, refuses to submit.

Ionesco foresaw everything, up to this minute; a world where "all others have succumbed to the 'beauty' of brute force... and mindlessness." [Derek Prouse]

As I take liberties with the sequence of Rhinoceros and introduce Ionesco's characters willy-nilly ...let's see how Ionesco's vision plays on today's stage.

News Item: Prime Minister Sharon, who helped initiate the settlement movement, and was elected upon a platform to be firm and uncompromising on terrorism, now insists that, under his doctrine of "painful concessions," numerous settlements will be dismantled, and that he will father a Palestinian state, even as terrorism continues.

Berenger finds out that yet another citizen has become a rhino: "But now [as] I come to think it over, Botard's behavior doesn't surprise me. His firmness was only a pose."

News item: Amram Lipkin Shahak, Israel's former chief of staff, applauds when the Palestinian national anthem is played in Geneva.

Dudard: "I still think it's not all that serious. I consider it silly to get all worked up because a few people decide to change their skins."

News Item: Colin Powell meets with the (Arab and Israeli) freelance authors of the Geneva Accords, whose protocols square with Jimmy Carter's Final Solution. Powell sees good progress. Bill Clinton is ready to get the show on the road. The former president tells Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo that he's all set to promote, market and sell the Geneva Initiative. (Or as some might say, an initiative to sell away Israel.)

Berenger: "Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately. It's because they are so good that they get taken in."

Dudard: "Rhinoceritis...perhaps it's just another disease."

News item: Four Israeli ex-security chiefs call for the immediate dismantling of all Jewish settlements in the territories. These four urge violent eviction, even if it leads to civil war.

Berenger: "They are the minority."

Dudard: "For the moment."

News item: Knesset legislator Zehava Gal-On demands that anything made by Israelis in the territories be identified by a special label, to make it easier to single out for boycott purposes.

Berenger: "If only it had all happened somewhere else [the rhino invasion], in some other country, and we just read about it in the papers...But when you're involved yourself, when you suddenly find yourself up against the brutal facts...the shock is too violent for you to stay cool and detached. I'm frankly surprised...I can't get over it."

News item (courtesy of Joseph Farah): Both AP and the New York Times "no longer accept as historical fact that a Jewish Temple once stood upon the Temple Mount in Jerusalem."

Daisy: "They're a pretty big minority, and getting bigger all the time."

News item: In Geneva...while the Palestinians preached their version of Israeli injustices in the world, the Israeli speakers [Yossi Beilin et al] did not make any mention of Palestinian terror and its horrors. As Israel was being denounced by speaker after speaker, the Israeli delegates at Geneva nodded approvingly.

Berenger: "We must do something before we're inundated...."

Dudard: "That's easier said than done."

Outpost               - 6 -               January 2004