Cum moare un vis

Un excepţional editorial în NYTimes, despre soarta clasei de mijloc americane actuale, citită prin grila unei piese celebre, "Moartea unui comis voiajor", de Arthur Miller, care se joacă din nou pe Broadway. 

"Yet “Salesman” is full of empathy for Willy. Mr. Miller remembered worrying in 1949 that “there was too much identification with Willy, too much weeping, and that the play’s ironies were being dimmed out by all this empathy.” He recalls with somber pride that the play’s first director, Elia Kazan, “was the first of a great many men — and women — who would tell me that Willy was their father.”

No wonder those first audiences’ identification was so strong: they recognized Willy’s search for humanity within his profit-driven job. Mr. Miller recalled that after performances during the play’s first run, “some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping.”

It’s hard to imagine a similar reaction among audiences today. Not only have the industries that employed the salespeople, factory workers, middle managers and others in the plentiful, humbler realms of mid-20th-century capitalism begun to dry up, but today’s capitalists no longer share Willy’s belief that he could attain dignity through his work.

In 1949, Willy’s desperate cry — “the competition is maddening!” — must have chilled theatergoers for whom competition still had a mostly positive connotation. In 2012, a fight to the death for shrinking opportunities in so many realms of life renders the idea of fair competition an anachronism. It is a sign of the times that sitcoms, in which trivial, everyday conflicts are comfortably resolved into neighborly harmony, are giving way to the Darwinian armageddons of reality TV. It is as if the middle class were being forced to watch the gladiatorial spectacle of its own destruction. "

E vremea ca şi membrii fragilei noastre clase de mijloc să vadă piesa, pentru a înţelege cum moare un vis...