Arthur Miller was as unto God to us of the Enfranchised. He made being white and male and comfortably middle-class but still ambitious something worth talking about and, more important, worth listening to. He combined rage and comedy, emotion and story. But the feat he achieved that makes him most worthy of our admiration is this: he won a girl (*the* girl, Marilyn Monroe) from a jock (*the* jock, Joe DiMaggio).
He died this morning. It will never be an event like JFK's assassination or 9/11. Instead, it's something we learn over coffee and/or donuts and then forget or remember. Well, for all of us except Arthur himself.
But how do we learn? How does news spread of this medium-sized-event? I took notes beginning with my discovery:
7:30: The NYTimes.com website has a news alert saying Arthur Miller is dead.
7:32: The Times proves itself to be twice the newspaper most others are by posting another, nearly-identical news alert. 2 minutes later, the first is gone.
7:35: ABCnews.com breaks a banner. Foxnews.com is still leading with the headline "Inside the Twisted Teacher-Student Sex Trend" (kids nowadays have no idea how good they ahve it) and the sidebar that sounds like a verse of that-song-where-you-repeat-it-each-time-using-only-one-vowel "Abbas vs. Hamas" (bonus points if you piece together how it would eventually tell of a conflict between musical-theater instruments and musical-theater lovers)
7:39: Foxnews.com updates it homepage. The banner at the top is a terse statement to the effect that Arthur Miller is dead. The image below is a burning police car in Iraq. My interpretation: if we stop "exposing the flaws in the fabric of the American Dream", the Terrorists Have Already Won(TM).
7:40: Cnn.com has the now-standard banner. A minute later, news.yahoo.com becomes the first news source I checked that acknowledged the issue, but only as the 5th article linked to, in small text. Apparently the computer that aggregates the feeds disliked The Crucible in 9th Grade Honors English.
7:42: The NYTimes.com replaces the banner with a prominently placed picture and a link to a canned obituary with date/cause of death scratched in.
7:45: CNN has paid its due fully. The banner is removed, and the demise of Arthur Miller is now the first link under "More News", playing second fiddle to an attack on a Bakery half-way around the world in an already war-torn region.
7:46: If you search on Google News, you finally get a link to an article from the Kansas City Star (ed. note: as near as I am aware, Arthur Miller never pronouned "Kansas City", let alone being a cultural institution on its Great White Way). In this article, Miller's caretaker declined to give a cause of death, compared to the New York Times, which had already reported it as "congestive heart failure" 4 minutes ago. How you gonna get a Pulitzer like that, huh, Kansas City Star?
7:49: CBSnews.com skips the banner, and links to its obituary with the heading "Death of a Playwright." I hope that if I ever die, you have the decency to honor me with a death of puns in the announcement of my demise. Thank you.
This story, I am sure, will continue to develop. But I am glad to have followed its workings thus far. I expect other news sites to give him the due he has earned in their estimation. IMDB will have a link on the right side, Amazon.com will offer you a good price on a 3-pack of his scripts (unless you're logging in on his account, in which case you're "The Page You Made" will be a great price on a coffin.
Join us next week when the New Yorker heaps praise upon Arthur Miller for precisely two paragraphs, reminiscing on his contributions to the magazine and its namesake, before explaining why he would have hated some facet of the current political administration.
I'm sorry if my analysis seems cynical, but it seems like every news source is predictable in their handling of his death: thoroughly opportunistic.
Present company included.
-Dan Bentley
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4 comments:
The comment, meant as a summing up, that "his most important accomplishment was winning a girl (The girl) from a jock," is pure Philistinism. Surely his life-work, with its moral, political and humanistic message, was of at least as much lasting value as the fact that he happened for a few years to share the bed of a woman (herself a very tragic figure, in the end) whose sexuality was hyped-up out of all proportion long before the word "hype" was invented.
The comment, meant as a summing up, that "his most important accomplishment was winning a girl (The girl) from a jock," is pure Philistinism. Surely his life-work, with its moral, political and humanistic message, was of at least as much lasting value as the fact that he happened for a few years to share the bed of a woman (herself a very tragic figure, in the end) whose sexuality was hyped-up out of all proportion long before the word "hype" was invented.
I'm sure that nobody, least of all my dramaphilic compatriot Dan, would suggest seriously that Miller is to be remembered for bedding Marilyn Monroe. To do so would be not only Philistinism but Phallustinism.
Rovaanaeste
rbpd
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