Predator Nation

The Dayton Metro Library has been the most important place in the city for me. The physical building is drab and uninspiring, and the staff make mistakes such as not properly processing returns, and there are many people who go in there just to get out of the cold or the heat or who have no other place to go.

But I get such good books from it, particularly from the new bookshelf, that I hold it holy.

The best book I got from my visit there yesterday was Charles H. Ferguson’s new book, Predator Nation. It’s horrifying and painful to read - a look into the abyss of the current USA “elite.”

But the corruption of the ”elite” is also very much mirrored in the corruption of the public. Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? has become a classic, or at least the common reference, for people who see the poor and dispossessed out there demonstrating in support of tax cuts and deregulation for the very people who have impoverished and dispossessed them.

I often listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio as I drive across Ohio and Indiana because there is nothing else on the radio even remotely intelligent. Limbaugh has the whole selfishness thing down cold, overlaying unalloyed hate. And Limbaugh is “successful” – a term that should just make you cringe whenever you hear anyone use it, because it invariably refers to some very “squalid” interpretation, to use William James’ expression.

The very fact itself that the content on the radio is so very shallow is no secret to anyone, either. Everybody knows and we know that everybody knows.

I particularly appreciated Ferguson’s appreciation of the academy’s collusion or collaboration. He won an Academy Award in 2011 for Inside Job, his documentary on the financial crisis in which he mentions that collusion. He writes at the beginning of the present chapter 8, “The Ivory Tower:”

Many people who saw Inside Job found that the most surprising, and disturbing, portion of the film was its revelation of widespread conflicts of interest in universities, think tanks, and government regulation. Viewers who watched my interviews with eminent professors were stunned at what came out of their mouths. It was indeed very disturbing, and sometimes I was stunned myself.

There are other books which have the same theme and perhaps deal more fully with the historical and cultural concomitants to the economic realities, but Ferguson's book is just clear and unassailable in what it does.

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