Trenchant and Turgid

Long-time readers of the New Yorker may recall cartoon-style ads for the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin. An odd little man in a crowd points in horror at some impending disaster while all around him remain oblivious, absorbed in the Bulletin. There is a similar quality of urgent and unheeded warning in certain radical critiques of bourgeois society. The task of the left is, in part, to awaken the popular conscience to outrageous social conditions; the vast majority are...