...just keeps on coming.

The Salt Lake Tribune:

Arthur Miller, the playwright ... whose Willy Loman character gave a face to modern American tragedy, died Thursday. He was 89. Asked in a 2001 interview why Loman's story seemed timeless for modern audiences, Miller said, "A lot of people give a lot of their lives to a company or even the government, and when they are no longer needed, when they are used up, they're tossed aside."

E.J. Dionne reflects on Miller's other timeless classic:

Miller instructed us on the individual's obligation to stand up to frightened, and thus dangerous, majorities. ... To say that "The Crucible," first produced in 1953, reads as if it were a response to today's headlines is just to repeat what has been said for half a century - by former dissidents in post-communist Eastern Europe no less than by American liberals during the McCarthy period. "I can always tell what the political situation is in a country when the play is suddenly a hit there," Miller wrote in his autobiography. "It is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past."

For our own moment, consider this speech by Deputy Gov. Danforth defending the role of Salem's witch-hunting court. "But you must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time - we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. "Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it. I hope you will be one of those."

The Trib continues:

The playwright had the great misfortune of achieving his greatest popular and critical success with Salesman at the age of 33, and living a long life thereafter in which he was alternately proclaimed a master and a has-been.

If there's anyone who could appreciate the irony in that, it was Arthur Miller.

I've been doing a little reading on the first president of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Apparently, in modern times, only two leaders have taken a word that means “teacher” as their title, Ataturk and Tanzanaian President Julius Nyerere. The picture of Ataturk below comes from his famous campaign to teach his entire population the Latin alphabet in just three months. (It took closer to six.)



I had a really good point I was getting to with all this, one that involved a tribute to Miller and some reflection on human nature, but they're kicking me out of the computer lab now. R.I.P Arthur Miller

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