"What this jury did to me will raise the ire of a growing white underclass in this society," Mr. Metzger warned in a press conference after the verdict.

You wonder sometimes how a fabulously wealthy nation can create a white underclass.

With great authority his poems hold intellectual, social, personal and religious elements in play, while they take the stubbornly unglamorous perspective of the "poor white" Australian underclass from which he comes.

Mr. Murray's warning about a permanent black and white underclass resembles the views of many at the turn of the century.

Also, U.S. News notices the "little-noticed" white urban underclass.

And what you realize is that he's writing about a black and white underclass.

On a less innocent level, it is because he comes from a world that is not supposed to exist, the world of the white underclass.

His prophecy last year of a coming white underclass touched a national nerve, and it brought a flurry of proposals to deny welfare to young mothers.

But he rose to new prominence last October with an article in The Wall Street Journal that predicted the rise of a large white underclass.

What's more, the immediate causes of anarchic behavior are hardly racist; the symptoms of moral and social chaos increasingly apply to the less visible, predominantly rural and suburban white underclass.