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On 3/16/2012 3:27 PM, guava tree wrote:
posting my thoughts on this play, which has recently had a Broadway
revival-- There's more to be said I think about the intersection of
playwrights and the CP& HUAC, but this is mostly centered on the
content of the play:
http://www.swans.com/library/art11/lproy23.html
Arthur Miller
One of our Greatest Political Artists
by Louis Proyect
(Swans - February 14, 2005) Arthur Miller, one of our greatest
political artists, died at the age of 89 on February 11, 2005.
Although none of his other plays received the critical acclaim of
"Death of a Salesman," his reputation could rest on this one work
alone. Whatever his sixteen other plays, including "The Crucible"
or "The Price," might have lacked in craftsmanship they more than
made up for in terms of political and social insight. For Miller
the ultimate goal of a work of art was to provide some kind of
lesson for humanity. If some critics in this age of postmodernist
irony deemed that old-fashioned, Miller was content -- as we on
the left should be -- to adopt the stance embodied in Dante's:
"Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti." This dictum, which
Marx cited in the opening pages of Capital, means "Go your own way
and let people talk."
Although his father was a wealthy garment manufacturer, the
Depression would reduce the family to poverty. Like fellow New
Yorker and Jew Howard Zinn, Miller eventually went to work in the
Brooklyn Navy Yard, a hotbed of labor radicalism. Like Zinn,
Miller never joined the Communist Party but was content to speak
out against injustice on his own. Zinn's medium was history and
Miller's was the theater. Both knew who the enemy was and refused
to be cowed into political submission, standing up to witch
hunters in the 1950s and '60s. Now with efforts afoot to launch a
new McCarthyism against dissidents in the academy, such as Ward
Churchill or Mohammad S. Alam, the heroic example of earlier
resisters should serve the movement well.
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