Joe Bageant’s posthumous collection of essays, Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball, is exactly the kind of straight-talking, tequila-slamming political commentary you’d expect from a man who regards his fellow Americans as ‘genuine and intellectual moral snobs whose consciousness is pretty much glued onto an armature of noise, sports, sex, sugar, and saturated fats’. Bageant, however, is hard to pigeonhole politically. Devout cynic that he was, it’s hard to tell if Bageant would have applauded or dismissed the Occupy anti-capitalist movement currently sweeping the globe. While steadfastly critical of the corporate elite, he’s equally scornful of the so-called ‘thinking classes’, who he views as out of touch with the common man, or common ‘redneck’– a rather politically incorrect term he gets away with using by proudly owning it.

While Bageant is heavy on the criticism, one criticism which could fairly be leveled against him is that he is light on offering any solutions. Perhaps this is why he gained such a huge online following – riled up readers were able to interact with Bageant through email and forums, something the offline paperback cannot provide. Thankfully, Bageant’s essays avoid a preachiness commonly associated with those other angry white men, Michael Moore and Glenn Beck, who seem to lack his self-denigrating touch (a ‘moralizing, preachy, and essentially lazy bastard who likes to drink’ is one of the gentler self-descriptions he offers his readers).

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with what Bageant has to say on politics and society. What’s important is that you read it and have something to say. For all Bagaent’s devil-may-care attitude to political correctness, he is most angered by the level of political apathy spreading among the citizenry. As he grimly concludes, ‘How can we solve the problem when we are the problem, other than by self-extinction?’

Emily Laidlaw is a freelance reviewer