Response to the Article

The subtitle for the US edition of this book was Dispatches from America's Class War. You might think it would be the Americans, not the British, who would run a mile from publishing a book with the phrase "class war" in its title. Class is not even meant to exist there, whereas everyone here knows that it does (Zeitchik: 10).

Joe Bageant argues that class is very much alive in the US: an "American hologram" in which every citizen props up an iniquitous structure in order to protect a redundant dream of wealth and self-actualisation. The class war is fought cold - with words, reproaches, snubs and deliberate mishearings - between mostly urban liberals and largely rural conservatives, who snipe at each other from class-segregated homes, bars and schools.

Almost by definition - as Bageant illustrates with painful statistics on Americans' illiteracy (apparently nearly half can't read or write fluently) - any book about class must take the form of explaining working-class life to middle-class people. "It is as if your people were some sort of exotic, as if you were from Yemen or something," an editor from New York once told him ("Bageant, Joe: Deer Hunting With Jesus.", Web).

He can oblige with great insight and validity because he is of working-class Appalachian stock: his mother worked in a textile mill, while his dad ran a gas station on behalf of its owner. He grew up in and in later life returned to the poor North End of Winchester, Virginia, after many years spent in various shades of countercultural penury, first as an anti-war activist (he served in Vietnam), then as a teacher and writer.

His hippy adventures brought about in him a kind of wild-eyed lucidity when regarding the spectre of American capitalism, while his background gives him licence to be plain rude. Bageant believes, without question, that a majority of white working-class and poor Americans voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004 because they are stupid.

More precisely, they are "downright stupid", "dumber than owl shit". Even worse, Christian fundamentalist schools, "those American madrassas", are "a sure way to make the masses even more stupid if there was one" (Bush: 7). One imagines he'll have to stand a lifetime's worth of rounds to keep his table at the Royal Lunch, a real-life Moe's Tavern whose regulars provide Bageant with enough saloon-bar philosophy to begin their own school. His old schoolfriend, Tom, trots out the clichés as though he doesn't even believe them he, which may well, is the case.

"Life is tough," he offers. "Stick with what you know." He really does believe, however, that George W Bush "cuts bush on his ranch" while John Kerry, the losing Democrat in 2004, goes "windsurfing at Martha's Vineyard. Who the hell goes windsurfing?" Lots of people do, of course; just no one who drinks at the Royal Lunch. With that logic - a rough one at best, argues Bageant, comprising "things that sound as if they might be true" (Dixler: 24)- a president ...