Middle-class sympathy, on the other hand, isn't so easily treated.
However, the woman's teen-age daughter, who had left home with only a handbag and three negligee sets, was probably right in saying that its name, Hootchie-Mamma Kitty, was "too ghetto" for middle-class sympathy.
"I think a lot of students start with an upper-middle-class sympathy with the strikers, but when they see the effect the strike will have on them, it might turn the students against them," said Daniel Koffler, a sophomore from Teaneck, N.J., who said the strikers' rally and police restrictions forced him and his parents to park several blocks from his dorm before unloading.
Snyder dressed in thrift-store clothing and was proud of his working-class sympathies and his wilderness experience.
There was little fantasy - no Alice in Wonderland or Dracula - and under Franco fiction was further hobbled by censorship: the few novels being written were heavy with working-class sympathies, with censor-baffling imagery.
He remains renowned as one of country music's greatest songwriters and performers, viewed as a "folk poet" with a "honky-tonk swagger" and "working-class sympathies".
It's possible to portray the dispossessed or embattled (largely white) working class with sympathy, compassion, dignity and even humour.
Questions of class and sympathy are touchy ones these days; more than a century after these books were written, a one-percenter like Wharton invariably reads as the product of a long-dead era, one in which conspicuous wealth could pass without judgment.
If the actor's vocal "flaw" had been an accent that revealed unacceptably working-class origins, sympathy would be genuinely merited (though a happy ending would have been harder; the transition to sound really did wreck careers on that basis).
Mr Abhisit would object to such a description, but his class betrays little sympathy or interest in the aspirations of rural and working-class voters.
