Posthumous prophecy …

… The University Bookman: Passos and Century’s End. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Dos Passos is that rare writer who understands the temptation of conflating the allure of ideology with reality, and how succumbing leads to certain tragedy. Nowhere is this truer, the author suggests throughout Century’s Ebb, than the arrogance of dead-end ideas and their corresponding pernicious values. Ideas, he tells us, have consequences; baneful ideas have calamitous effects. We can convey this in today’s popular lingo by suggesting that, without the hardware, there is only the illusion of progress.