Some say Joe Bageant's meteoric rise in popularity as a commentator on class issues in the United States owes as much to his prescience as to his eloquence.
After all, the politically incorrect 64-year-old author, essayist and blogger who enjoys renown outside the US for his best-selling essay collection Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War, predicted the advent of both George W. Bush and the mortgage meltdown long before others did.
But Bageant is quick to decry any notion of prescience and credits his vast readership to the fact that 'I'm so damned average, that what I write resonates with people. My fears are the average person's fears. It may be that they're inchoate, undefined, but there's a feeling that something has changed, and it's bad and it's scary and it's big and it's hard to define'.
But he will admit he knows how to move people. 'I'm thinking what a lot of us are thinking, but I say it maybe with a little more humour or soul.' When political newsletter CounterPunch published one of his early essays predicting Bush would win the American presidency, he recalls, 'the needle just went over and laid down'.
Bageant's been bending readership gauges ever since. But it was in 1999 that he turned his back on the corporate media world he had worked in for 30 years and returned to his rural roots in Winchester, Virginia, looking for clues to Bush's ascendancy and America's future, and did not hold back when he found them. 'I just started putting things out there, on the internet, and it kind of went off the charts from the very beginning.'
Now being developed as a television series, Deer Hunting With Jesus went on to bolster an internet readership of millions with its searing insights into a burgeoning white American underclass whose existence no one wants to acknowledge.