February 12, 2005
WHAT'S AMERICAN ABOUT STALINISM?
A Morality That Stared Down Sanctimony (CHARLES ISHERWOOD, 2/12/05, NY Times)
Arthur Miller may or may not be the greatest playwright America has produced - Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams both have equal, if not more, claim to that phantom title - but he is certainly the most American of the country's greatest playwrights.He was the moralist of the three, and America, as some recent pollsters rushed to remind us, is a country that likes moralists. The irony, of course, is that Mr. Miller's strongest plays are fired by convictions that assail some of the central ideals enshrined in American culture.
Indeed, he was an anti-moralist and an anti-American. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2005 6:37 PM
Comments
Whether or not he was a great playwrite, the idea that he wasn't sanctimonious is mindboggling. Like most of his fellow travelers, he was nothing but sanctimonious. In fact, I literally looked in the dictionary under "sanctimonious", and there he was: "a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity" (Mark Twain).
Posted by: David Cohen at February 12, 2005 7:07 PM