Cain was Abel and Biff was Happy

Complete non-sequitor headlines aside, we here at The Enfranchised were, like many others, saddened by the news of the passing of one of the great American writers.

Dan is joking, of course, when he suggests that Miller is to be admired most for wooing Norma Jean away from The Yankee Clipper. Though, it is perhaps sad in its own right that maybe the last man ever to have loved Monroe is gone from the earth. And sad, too, that we'll probably never see an American couple like that again---something tells me that Britney Spears and Thomas Pynchon won't marry, and that it wouldn't be quite the same even if they did.

David Mamet wrote what I think is one of the ballsier obits. In praising Miller's drama as appealing "not to the fashion of the moment, but to the problems both universal and eternal, as they are insoluble," Mamet also manages a bit of a fuck-you to the going fetishization of the "fetishization of the other" that garners MacArthur Genius Grants these days (do any of your readers doubt that when Mamet disses the "enthusiastic" "bad drama" of today he has Suzan Lori-Parks and Tony Kushner in mind?)

Truth is, I'd like to believe that Miller will be remembered as the last American playwright with any sense of subtlety. The Crucible is an ideological exorcism of America that is as scathing as it is discrete; Death of a Salesman annihilates our most deeply held illusions with such quietude that it almost feels nice.

When Simon and Garfunkel sang, famously, in The Graduate: "Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?/ A Nation turns its lonely eyes to you..." Jumpin Joe's somewhat bewildered response was reported to be: "What do they mean? I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial."

If we can say anything for Marilyn's second husband, its that he won't be going anywhere, for a long, long time.