Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman tells his friend Charlie “. . . you end up worth more dead than alive.”
Those words seem uncomfortably true after a 16-year-old honors student was beaten to death by boys with sticks in Roseland, Illinois last week. Suddenly the Divines swooped down on the occasion, Reverends Jackson and Farrakhan, and the Bureaucrats too, General Holder and Secretary Duncan.
Too little, too late. He was being paid more attention dead than he ever received alive. And the same goes for the safety problems he might have faced as he moved from home to school environs.
It is ironic that Mr. Duncan came to grieve and pontificate. It was his very own school policies as eductaion chief in Chicago which failed to create an environment of safety for this boy (and thousands of others) and may have even exacerbated his isolation by revving up the very competitive mentality which eats Willy Loman alive from the inside out: the archetypal "get ahead" American Dream which has been rotting in front of the nostrils of Salesman audiences who have smelled its stink for 60 years now.
Competition is what isolates and destroys community in our society. If “coming out number one man ” is “the only dream you can have” as Happy Loman declares over his father’s dead body at the end of Salesman, then 99% of the dreamers are doomed to despair and frustration.
Mr. Duncan seems to think that by valorizing competition and anointing the winners in his “race to the top” he is reforming schools. He is merely metastasizing the cancer which is already eating at society----another Arthur Miller theme in Death of a Salesman: The Anonymity of Modern Man [and woman].
I remember the Reverend Jesse Jackson coming to Kent State the year after the 1970 shootings and leading an outdoor rally of hundreds of students in a shouted chant “I AM somebody” over and over again, as if there might be some doubt about that fact that needed clarification.
"I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman", the father screams in frustration to the son in Salesman, betraying a similar doubt and desperate need to clarify.
(Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1970)
In communities where police walked a beat and knew your name instead of rolling by in motorized shields, where teachers thought of their students as “MY kids” instead of test takers, where parents, not a television or computer, kept a mothering or fathering eye on their kids, people DID feel like somebody.
Now no matter how many times we chant those words over and over and over again the claim seems hollow, even laughable today.
As Biff Loman says to his father, most of us are “just another hard-working drummer who winds up in the ash can like all the rest of them.”
(Secretary of Education Arne Duncan)
(Attorney General Eric Holder)
Mr. Duncan, Mr. Holder, and the Divines can do all the post-mortem band-aid work they want. The problem is greater than us all: The engine which runs our economy, eats its people alive.
The God of Materialism is ever hungry and ever on the prowl.
Emptiness reigns.
PK
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From the author of "Winning isn't Everything", a speech delivered as President of Yale University
“Many of the abuses, including the abuse of drugs or alcohol or steroids among some college athletes or some professional athletes, stem from the complete athletization of life, the displacement of all social rules by the rules of the game’s culture. Totally absorbed, some feel invulnerable, invincible, completely exempt from conventional expectations … the inevitable result, particularly among some former professional athletes well into their thirties (although I have seen it among college athletes and, in a few cases, with gifted high s chool athletes, whose ‘careers’ stopped at about 19), is that there is no place in the general culture for them when they no longer fit in the cult. They have prepared no skill or trade, have eschewed all other interests, have made no plan or expressed any desire for a plan, because no one told them or they refused to believe that there comes an end to running, an end to the cheers, an end to the life lived on the cuff, to the endless pleasuring of themselves. … Such people are as if newborn when it is over, accustomed to packing a suitcase but not to carrying it, unaccustomed to few if any of the hundreds of daily activities that require one to negotiate for oneself.”
- A. Bartlett Giamatti
