Joe Bageant

Richard Oxman interviews Joe Bageant (Part 1)

Richard Oxman conducted a long interview with Joe Bageant that appeared on several websites. Here is Part One.

Dining With the Rhinos

Eugene Ionesco and the Empire

By Joe Bageant

Thanks to an online friend, I recently rediscovered Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros -- the one about being fully human in a totalitarian state. Berenger, the play's protagonist, is a humanist stranded in a society slowly becoming monsters. Rhinoceroses to be exact, a symbol for a herding mindless ugliness in an unthinking stampede. Ultimately Berenger is the last pink flesh and blood man left in a stampeding rhinoceros herd, and comes to grasp that the stampede itself is what it is all about. It is the stampede, the mindless charging off together that causes the metamorphosis of people into rhinos.