Last week, when Arthur Miller died at age 89, America lost more than an award-winning playwright – we lost a candid and nuanced commentator on American life.

There are few better qualified to speak about America and the American Dream than Miller. His family, hurt by the Depression, couldn’t afford to send him to college so he worked in New York as a loader and shipping clerk to earn enough money to finally attend the University of Michigan.

Just 11 years after graduating, he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Death of A Salesman” in 1949. He was 33.

One might think our current “moral values” society would have a strong demand for Miller’s works, which often spoke to issues of family, morality and personal responsibility. But the worlds of Miller’s plays don’t offer the oversimplified, black-and-white concept of morality that has become so popular – the type of morality, for example, that passionately decried Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at last year’s Super Bowl and led to the lifeless crop of dull Super Bowl commercials this year.

Rather, Miller often explores difficult moral gray areas. Why should we care about the fate of Willy Loman, the central character of “Death of a Salesman” who cheats on his wife, Linda? Linda answers that for us: “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”

In “The Crucible,” which opened in 1953, Miller provided commentary on McCarthyism, likening it to the Salem Witch Trials. In describing the character of Reverend Hale, Miller objects to the polarizing mentality that often leads to such cultural hysteria – a hysteria that is present in the political talk shows and the “with us or against us” rhetoric of today.

“Ours is a divided empire,” Hale criticizes, “in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer.”

“The concept of unity,” he explains, “in which … good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon – such a concept is still reserved for the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.”

As a result of us ignoring this “concept of unity,” Miller warns that “political opposition can be given an inhumane overlay.” More than 50 years later, his warning still rings true. We saw this “overlay” run rampant throughout last year’s election season. Think political attack ads. Think Swift Boat Veterans. Think protesters at the RNC. Think Zell Miller.

Whether you’re a war-mongering conservative or an America-hating liberal, it’s hard not to feel as though your political rivals have demonized you, and that the important political discussion that should be taking place has been supplanted by name-calling and stereotypes. A glance at my e-mail inbox on the day my column runs is usually enough to persuade me of this.

Arthur Miller’s death leaves us without a fine literary and social commentator. But he has left us his plays, which, if we are willing to listen, provide us with many lessons about his time, and our own.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.