Stories From the Bar Stool.

On weekends, my husband and I often stop by the local bar in a one-bar Pennsylvania town that I'll call Endwood. There's no other watering hole within 16 kilometers of the Endwood Inn, so if you're thirsty you go there. To the broke or the loaded, the Rhodes scholar or the possum- brained, the Endwood is home--a two-story, wood-frame, clapboard-sided affair, complete with rickety porch, slamming screen door and hurricane cellar, just in case.

If you want to know what Americans are thinking or feeling these days, order a beer or two there, and they'll tell you. The Endwood's claptrap coziness, augmented by vintage neon beer signs, illuminates the tensions and complicities between its various patrons, which can be various indeed. At its liveliest, the Endwood resembles the intergalactic cantina in "Star Wars," where every breed of alien gathers in companionable inebriation.

One Saturday night near summer's end, a cluster of local factory workers got shuffled in among a flush of landed gentry. A woman told me how she'd started factory work straight out of high school because "what it paid was, back then, real money." Now, with wages lower and jobs gone, her only hope was her son, headed for college in Florida on an athletic scholarship.

As for the heirs to local estates, they believed they were entitled to a better tax rate than those without inheritances, just as they were certain--beyond the indignity of doubt--that "all this climate change is cyclical." One of them claimed to have modeled his mountaintop home on Hitler's Eagle's Nest. Just kidding, he added.

On the surface, anyone playing pool on the Endwood's diminutive table was as good as his or her last shot; everyone feeding bills into the jukebox was an equal among peers. But when the rich men ...