THE LAST OF THE DEPRESSION LEFT BITES THE DUST
More than just a word about the deceased playwright Arthur Miller. If you are younger than 40 you don’t know who the hell he used to be. The icon supremo of the Left around the world, a literate agitator who was never as good as the hard core Commie, Bertolt Brecht, or nearly as communicative or productive as the super Left Communist Party member Clifford Odets [“Awake and Sing!," "Waiting for Lefty, " and "Paradise Lost”—movies: “Golden Boy,” “Sweet Smell of Success”, “Country Girl” and more]. Faulty link now corrected, ed.

Arthur Miller picked up the badge of politically correct drama in the American Theater during the 40s where the Hollywood bound Odets left off. Miller was the super hip Lefty writer of the era, loved by all the usual suspects. Since back then, as now, most of the university teachers were Communists, they had Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” “All My Sons,” and later “The Crucible” on must read lists—along with Odets—and you either praised them all or risked a “C.”

When you see Miller’s alleged masterpiece, “Death of a Salesman” today you wonder why any adult could ever have bought into such a bogus piece of shit. The story revolves around Willy Loman, a failure who never sold anything in his life without bribing some buyer; a guy who cheated on his wife and cries when he is caught; a guy who whines about the stage about paying off his house and running out of money when all he had to do was re-fi the thing and live happily ever after; it just plain sucks. The corrupt lead character, Willy Loman, was supposed to represent all of America. He didn’t. The play doesn’t. And looking at it now you see that the play has nothing. But back in those days you couldn’t re-finance, or if you could nobody knew anything about it. A still Depression stunned America, most of which had lost faith in capitalism, bought into that play as if Jesus had written it. Staged by the ever so Left Group Theater alumni, Elia Kazan, and mounted in a surrealist set, it featured the first "common man" tragic hero and every audience seemed to think it was about them and the bleak future that surely awaited them in Capitalist America. The popularity of the play says more about the Depression generation than it does about drama.

The other play that “made him” was called All My Sons and watching it today is like an afternoon with a dead whore. Left wing ranting about some guy who sells defective parts to the army during the war and guilt and greed and that horrid capitalism; Left Wing college professor Art with a capital “A.” The movie with Edward G Robinson plays on Turner once in a while.

Miller’s only other sort of good play, The Crucible is all about McCarthyism and tries to tell us that rallying a mob to hang a witch in 1680 is exactly as wrong as ratting out the ton of Russian Communist spies in the Roosevelt Administration and Los Alamos. Acording to Miller, spies who sold us down the river shouldn’t have been ratted out but allowed to continue contributing to Stalin. They love this play in the Ivy Leagues.

All in all Miller was simply telling the old Communist Left exactly what they wanted to hear, wanted to believe, and his plays still serve as one of their Biblical references. I doubt that anything he wrote will be remembered in fifty years except by the academic left. Attempts to re-stage “Death of a Salesman” have all tried to humanize it and soft pedal all the propaganda but it just doesn’t work, except to the Left.

Miller was a good soldier. Stalin was proud of him.