🦄 Send in the Unicorns
There are days and nights when the world feels like a badly written sketch — part tragedy, part meme, with the laugh track slightly out of sync.
“Because when the world is this stupid, only something imaginary stands a chance.“
And then, out of nowhere, a unicorn shows up.
Not the corporate one from Silicon Valley or the plush toy from childhood, but the ancient, ridiculous, glorious kind: the creature that keeps coming back every time power gets too serious.
My latest Camino a Ítaca column for HOY, “¡Soltad los unicornios!”, dives into that absurd endurance — how a mythical beast has survived every cultural mutation imaginable.
From holy relic to billion-dollar startup, from sex-party slang to symbol of street resistance, the unicorn refuses extinction. And maybe that’s the point: laughter, irony, and imagination are still the sharpest weapons we have.
While the so-called “violent” protesters in the U.S. march dressed as unicorns and frogs, the ones dreaming of Hitler sit comfortably in suits and call it democracy.
It’s all so ridiculous it loops back into revelation.
Because when the world goes fascist again, sometimes the only sane response is a pink inflatable animal and a very loud laugh.
You can read the full column in HOY here 👉 https://www.hoy.es/opinion/troy-nahumko-troynahumko-soltad-unicornios-20251018230644-nt.html
Below is the English version of the article in full.
Send in the Unicorns
Troy Nahumko
As a boy, its meaning was simple enough. It was my foolproof gift for my mother — a safe bet in a dangerous world of expectations. From crude lumps of clay to cheap statuettes, birthdays and every half-forgotten celebration in between, my mom got a unicorn. A small, shimmering lie. A symbol of purity, sure — but also of imagination as survival.
The mythical beast began as a hallucination scribbled by Mesopotamian dreamers — a one-horned maybe-goat staggering across clay tablets like a prototype NFT of holiness.
Then the Bible translators crash the party — wild-eyed, drunk on sacramental wine, half-blind with certainty, misreading ancient Hebrew like they’re late for the apocalypse. They take re’em, a perfectly respectable bull, and through the holy miracle of bad linguistics turn it into our unicorn. And just like that, the Church inherited its first imaginary pet. Jesus gains a mascot — a horny mammal of immaculate conception, an allegory in heat.
Time bends. Capitalism sharpens its own horn.
By the time the term resurfaces in Silicon Valley, the unicorn isn’t holy anymore — it’s profitable. It becomes a startup valued at a billion dollars, an organism made of spreadsheets and existential dread.
And as if capitalism’s parody weren’t enough, unicorns slink into our bedrooms. Polyamory adopts it: a third partner for a couple’s adventure. The fantasy becomes the product — desired, temporary, disposable. Even sex gets an IPO.
Then the metamorphosis completes its glorious, absurd circle — irony comes home wearing riot gear.
Portland, 2025: protesters march against ICE, fascism, and the whole boot-on-the-neck industrial complex. And there they are — giant inflatable unicorns bobbing through tear gas. The myth resurrected as farce: pink, plastic, Walmart-bought exorcisms of empire. Cops, sweating and dead-eyed, try to look stoically masculine while wrestling inflatable blowup dolls. Enlightenment by way of absurdity: pure laughter as political weapon.
From sacred relic to startup mascot to anarchic prank, the unicorn has been trolling power for millennia — sometimes in church, sometimes on Wall Street, now in the streets. The horn never meant purity; it meant refusal to be defined. The unicorn was never real, and that’s exactly why it works.
Because when the world is this stupid, only something imaginary stands a chance.
The Americans — for all their chaos, their ego, their national ADHD — have a genius for this kind of rebellion. They can turn oppression into art. Think segregation 1.0: out came the Blues, then the glorious detonation of rock and roll — Chuck Berry duck-walking over racists, flamboyantly gay Little Richard screaming “Tutti Frutti” in a sequined red suit, dismantling the KKK with a single falsetto note.
And now, Fascism 2.0 — rebooted, rebranded — is stalking the planet again. All across Spain, their ghouls whitewash the past, rebranding Franco as a misunderstood saint, deleting “dictatorship” like a bad tweet. The nightmare is back — and it’s sitting in comfortable chairs in government.
So maybe we should take yet another page from the Americans: don’t meet hate with somberness — mock its hypocrisy until it implodes. Parade inflatable unicorns past their rallies. Turn their rancid ideology into carnival. Humor and satire are still legal — for now — and we need more unicorns than dour-faced politicians or masked trash-bin burners.
Because nothing scares authoritarians more than laughter echoing off their hysteria. Nothing confuses power quite like a pink inflatable dream refusing to die.
En castellano https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eI-vlaS5S7TrTsrw9R85qShQaFaENqhE/view?usp=sharing
