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"    My father was a salesman, and he hated Arthur Miller. He hated him on general priniciple and he hated him for reasons specific enough to seem peculiar. He hated Miller because Miller was a leftist and an intellectual, and he hated Miller because Miller &amp;quot;stole&amp;quot; Marilyn Monroe from Joe DiMaggio, and then &amp;quot;killed&amp;quot; Clark Gable when Gable suffered a heart attack while starring with Monroe in Miller&amp;#039;s The Misfits. But mostly my father hated Miller because of Death of a Salesman My father never went to high school, much less graduated; he rode Miller&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;smile and a shoeshine&amp;quot; to a Cadillac, a closetful of sharp suits, and a house on Long Island with front steps made out of marble. He viewed his life as a triumph rather than as a source of pathos, and it wasn&amp;#039;t Miller&amp;#039;s contempt for what he did for living that cut him to the quick. It was Miller&amp;#039;s pity. So when I read the op-ed that Lee Siegel wrote for the Times last week on Broadway&amp;#039;s current revival of Miller&amp;#039;s great play, I was sympathetic to its counter-intuitive aims. Siegel makes the point that the empathy that Death of a Salesman elicits for Willy Loman is the accidental outcome of Miller&amp;#039;s artistry, rather than its intention \u2014 and that when Miller went to the first productions of the play in 1949 and saw audiences weeping for his tragic hero, he worried that &amp;quot;there was too much identification with Willy,&amp;quot; and that his ironies were being lost. Siegel does a nice job of updating those ironies. He points out that tickets to a play intended as &amp;quot;an exposure of middle-class delusions&amp;quot; now cost anywhere from $111 to $840 apiece, and that as a result of the play becoming &amp;quot;a luxury item,&amp;quot; audiences no longer identify with Willy Loman. They sneer at him.  &amp;quot;Instead of humbling its audience through the shock of recognition, the play now confers upon the people who can afford to see it a feeling of superiority,&amp;quot; Siegel writes. It is not simply that the audience for Death of a Salesman is no longer middle-class; it&amp;#039;s that the middle class itself has, in Siegel&amp;#039;s words, &amp;quot;nearly ceased to exist,&amp;quot; along with the values it once embodied. &amp;quot;In our time of banker hustlers, real-estate hustlers and Internet hustlers, of suckers and &amp;#039;muppets,&amp;#039; it is unlikely that anyone associates happiness and dignity with working hard for a comfortable existence purchased with a modest income. Even what&amp;#039;s left of the middle class disdains a middle-class life. Everyone, rich, poor and in between, wants infinite pleasure and fabulous riches.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a powerful \u2014 even bracing \u2014 argument. Too bad it&amp;#039;s such utter bollocks.  Has Lee Siegel never gotten on a plane on a Monday morning and seen the latest generation of Willy Lomans \u2014 riding not on a smile and a shoeshine, but on a laptop and a spreadsheet \u2014 slugging down the last of a Starbucks coffee as they ready themselves for yet another week on the road... or, rather, in the air? Has he never been to the suburbs of Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas, or even Manhattan and seen America&amp;#039;s middle class celebrate itself with an endless sprawl of stores and subdivisions? Has he never been to one of America&amp;#039;s mega-churches, which flourish primarily because they take it upon themsleves to institutionalize and protect the &amp;quot;set of admirable values&amp;quot; that Siegel pronounces dead? Without a doubt, the American middle class is under unprecedented pressure, but that has more to do with the collapse of the housing market \u2014 and the inflation of secondary education \u2014 than it does with the demise of its values and dreams. The American middle class has always existed to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable: settled values with unsettled ones, social mobility with a sense of permanence. Take away the ability to move up, and on \u2014 the ability to pay for college, or sell your house \u2014 and it becomes a prison, resistant to change, deadly to hope, and convinced that it is under siege whenever the price of gas goes up. Willy Loman might have been &amp;quot;a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine,&amp;quot; but the ability to be &amp;quot;out there in the blue&amp;quot; has always been at least as important to Miller&amp;#039;s famous equation as the smile and shoeshine, and it is what has become endangered and provisional about the American middle class, not its values. Miller, by the way, was right about my father. Lou Junod made a lot of money and lost a lot of money, started with nothing and ended up with the same, and provided me with an inheritance consisting of a can of Gold Bond powder and a couple of cans of Edge, along with a half-used tin of, yes, black shoe polish. But he never stopped hating Arthur Miller, and even at the down-at-the-heels end of his life, he never would have conceded the fundamental accuracy of Miller&amp;#039;s portrayal \u2014 not because the portrayal was inaccurate, but because he, as a man who rose and fell within the confines of the American middle class, didn&amp;#039;t like being talked down to. And that&amp;#039;s something that people need to remember, whether they are members of the commentariat, like Siegel, or presidential candidates staking out the middle class as the crucial battleground in the upcoming election. Indeed, as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney set out to court &amp;quot;the Willy Loman vote,&amp;quot; they might want to read Siegel&amp;#039;s column for a lesson on the perils of addressing a class to which one doesn&amp;#039;t belong. &amp;quot;In our current context,&amp;quot; Siegel writes, &amp;quot;Willy&amp;#039;s dreams of love, dignity and community through modest work make him a deluded loser.&amp;quot; Really? Even cursory acquaintance with any middle-class suburb in America would uncover an endless reserve of people who hold those dreams dear. But Siegel&amp;#039;s column is not only willfully obtuse and out of touch; it&amp;#039;s symptomatic of the very thing he sets out to criticize. Siegel says that people go to see Death of a Salesman to feel superior to Willy Loman instead of sympathizing with him. This is no doubt meant to sound sympathetic. But like Loman&amp;#039;s creator \u2014 and like the two presidential candidates if they&amp;#039;re not careful \u2014 Siegel can&amp;#039;t help but sound superior to a class of Americans he confidently declares dead, when in fact he&amp;#039;s just blind to their existence. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a13936/willy-loman-tragic-hero-8645012/>