Arthur Miller, "An Enemy of the People"....points us to great insights

[EVDebs]

In Bob Herbert's tribute to "Miller's Foresight"
http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1264092.html Herbert writes:

""Reading Miller again, and looking at his life, it's interesting to see some of the differences he has spotlighted in two sharply defined eras: the Depression-wracked 1930s and the prosperous postwar 1950s. "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.""

Yes, we CAN strive for a government on the side of the people. This led Miller to investigate Henrik Ibsen's great work 'An Enemy of The People' (1882) and its indictment of corrupt society. Miller did this adaptation just prior to "The Crucible".

I can only hope that Millers' reworking of this Ibsen play, a giant
standing upon the shoulders of another giant, will get more people to see "An Enemy of The People" (dvd available at www.kultur.com as one place where the PBS version starring Phillip Bosco can be found).

Dr. Stockman's quotes "the strongest people in the world are those who stand most alone" etc. etc. are priceless. See stage play review at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/theater/211047_enemyq.html .