The excerpt below is by Joe Bageant, the bard of Winchester, Virginia, and the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus. His fuse has been lit by the media tizzy over Barack Obama’s mostly accurate look at white working-class resentment. Read the whole essay here. (The photo below is not of Joe, but of the younger and more photogenic Larry the Cable Guy.)

In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence, never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in the class that benefits from our classist society.