Tomorrow night I will be dining at a soup kitchen in Hollywood. Well, not exactly a soup kitchen. The venue will, in fact, be Campanile, one of LA's fancier restaurants, located in Charlie Chaplin's old office complex.

Under normal circumstances, Campanile is so excruciatingly, don't-even-look-at-the-prices expensive that it charges for olive oil by the ounce. But for striking writers (and those with friends with Writers Guild of America cards), it will be offering a “soup kitchen” special, in the form of an $18 prix fixe menu.

Yes, there are some strange upsides to this strangest of strikes, the result of a dispute with studios over internet royalties, which have been going on for nearly a month now. Just the other day a writer friend of mine — he does the one-liners for a late-night talk show — was enthusing about how much weight he had lost by marching up and down Hollywood Boulevard while brandishing a “They Wrong, We Write” placard.

But here's the strangest thing of all: according to a recent poll, 63 per cent of Americans support these unlikeliest of picketers. So what's next? Striking hedge fund managers? CEO stoppages? Now that the American public has lent its sympathy to one of the tiniest and most privileged elites in modern society, surely anything is possible.

Most astonishing to me is the difference between the public's reaction to the writers and to a man called Pedro Zapeta, a 39-year-old dishwasher in Florida, whose unfortunate tale has been playing out at the same time.

Zapeta, an illegal immigrant, scrubbed pots for 11 years on minimum wage, somehow managing to save $62,000. Then it all went horribly wrong. At the airport on the way back to Guatemala, where he was planning to build a house and retire, the money was seized by US Customs, with a judge ruling that only $10,000 of it should be returned. Granted, Zapeta never paid what little taxes he owed, and he failed to declare his cash at the border (he doesn't speak English). Still, you might have expected this tale of the little man crushed by The System to inspire outrage in a country of immigrants. But no. So far, Zapeta's wellwishers have raised a mere $9,000. Meanwhile, back in LA, the writers — many of whom received cheques last week for several thousand dollars, because of a change in the way fees are paid for TV repeats — continue to be fêted as working-class heroes.

What does this say about America's mood? A lot, I fear. With the dollar owned by the Chinese, the oil supply owned by the Saudis and the labour market owned by the likes of Zapeta, Americans have finally had enough: it's time to look after their own. Protectionism is back. In another era, Pedro the Dishwasher might have been turned into a movie to rival Braveheart. But these days, writers have bigger things on their plate. Like that $18 prix fixe menu down at Campanile.

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