[Mb-civic] The Public Thinker

[Cheeseburger]

The Public Thinker

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/opinion/14herbert.html?hp

My isp mail is down, and these are arriving sometime after I am typing this,
so if these are repeats and someone has already posted them, sorry.  I'm
printing this one en toto as it is so pretty and maybe you can't make it to
the web site (where is that guy who knows Latin here, lol).  Arthur Miller's
obituary in the NY Times by Bob Herbert:


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Arthur Miller, in his autobiography, "Timebends," quoted the great physicist
Hans Bethe as saying, "Well, I come down in the morning and I take up a
pencil and I try to think. ..."

It's a notion that appears to have gone the way of the rotary phone.
Americans not only seem to be doing less serious thinking lately, they seem
to have less and less tolerance for those who spend their time wrestling
with important and complex matters.

If you can't say it in 30 seconds, you have to move on. God made man and the
godless evolutionists are on the run. Donald Trump ("You're fired!") and
Paris Hilton ("That's hot!") are cultural icons. Ignorance is in. The nation
is at war and its appetite for torture may be undermining the very essence
of the American character, but the public at large seems much more
interested in what Martha will do when she gets out of prison and what Jacko
will do if he has to go in.

Mr. Miller's death last week meant more than the loss of an outstanding
playwright. It was the loss of a great public thinker who believed strongly,
as Archibald MacLeish had written, that the essence of America - its
greatness - was in its promises. Mr. Miller knew what ignorance and fear and
the madness of crowds, especially when exploited by sinister leadership,
could do to those promises.

His greatest concerns, as Charles Isherwood wrote in Saturday's Times, "were
with the moral corruption brought on by bending one's ideals to society's
dictates, buying into the values of a group when they conflict with the
voice of personal conscience."

The individual, in Mr. Miller's view, had an abiding moral responsibility
for his or her own behavior, and for the behavior of society as a whole. He
said that while writing "The Crucible," "The longer I worked the more
certain I felt that as improbable as it might seem, there were moments when
an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling."

For the United States, which launched a misguided, pre-emptive war in Iraq,
is shipping prisoners off to foreign countries to be tortured and has
pressed the rewind button on matters of social progress, this may be one of
those moments.

Reading Miller again, and looking back on his life, it's interesting to see
some of the differences he has spotlighted in two sharply defined eras: the
Depression-wracked 1930's and the prosperous, postwar 1950's. "It was not
that people were more altruistic," he wrote in "Timebends," "but that a
point arrived - perhaps around 1936 - when for the first time unpolitical
people began thinking of common action as a way out of their impossible
conditions. Out of dire necessity came the surge of mass trade unionism and
the federal government's first systematic relief programs, the resurgent
farm cooperative movement, the TVA and other public projects that put people
to work and brought electricity to vast new areas, repaired and built new
bridges and aqueducts, carried out vast reforestation projects, funded
student loans and research into the country's folk history - its songs and
tales collected and published for the first time - and this burst of
imaginative action created the sense of a government that for all its
blunders and waste was on the side of the people."

By the early 50's the agony of the Depression was gone. McCarthyism was in
flower and the dean of Mr. Miller's alma mater, the University of Michigan,
was complaining that his students' highest goal was to fit in with corporate
America rather than separating truth from falsehood.

The dean, Erich Walter, said, "They become experts at grade-getting, but
there's less hanging round the lamppost now, no more chewing the fat," or,
as Mr. Miller put it, "speculating about the wrongs of the world and ideal
solutions, something no employer was interested in, and might even suspect."

Mr. Miller understood early that keeping the population entertained was
becoming the paramount imperative of the U.S. We're now all but buried in
entertainment and the republic is running amok. Mr. Miller is gone, and if
we're not wise enough to pay attention, his uncomfortable truths will die
with him. (He felt, among other things, that most men and women knew "little
or nothing" about the forces manipulating their lives.)

Anyway, the Grammys were last night and Michael Jackson's trial resumes
today.

Arthur Miller? Broadway dimmed its lights Friday night. His country may
decide that's enough of a tribute and it's time to move on.


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Cheeseburger

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