Happy Birthday, Arthur Miller
Miller, the author of “The Crucible,” is what Russell Baker has called a “tribal storyteller.”
From an essay by Baker in The New York Review of Books, issue dated November 6, 2003 (Fortieth Anniversary Issue):
“Among the privileges enjoyed by rich, fat, superpower America is the power to invent public reality. Politicians and the mass media do much of the inventing for us by telling us stories which purport to unfold a relatively simple reality. As our tribal storytellers, they shape our knowledge and ignorance of the world, not only producing ideas and emotions which influence the way we live our lives, but also leaving us dangerously unaware of the difference between stories and reality.”
— Russell Baker, “The Awful Truth,” NYRB 11/6/03, page 8
Here is a rather similar view of the media:
The attentive student of this second essay will have no difficulty finding a single four-letter word to replace both of Baker’s phrases “rich, fat, superpower America” and “politicians and the mass media.”
Baker’s concern for “the difference between stories and reality” is reflected in my own website The Diamond Theory of Truth. In summary:
“Is it safe?” — Sir Laurence Olivier