Judging by his testimony today, AIG’s CEO Edward Liddy seems like a nice enough guy, and sincere. More so than most of his Capitol Hill inquisitors, actually.

I'm finding it hard to be mad at him. I’m finding it hard to be mad at any of the bogeymen.

I notice that just about one hundred percent of this outrage about AIG executives’ bonuses—or Madoff or Citigroup or that CNBC—is coming from people whose eyes glazed over and rolled at the first cocktail-party killing mention of the growing disparity between the salaries of top executives and the wages of the rank and file. And people who fiercely and mindlessly defended the right of the super-rich to be super-rich and multiply, no matter how poor the poor fucks were.

In order for you to question the social sensibility of this economic structure, it needs to be your actual tax dollars paid in bonuses to the very executives who made the bailout necessary?

Does it take a sledgehammer to wake you up in the morning?

Carlin was right: We've traded a lot for our comforts and our gadgets—we've traded our common sense about social justice and we've traded much of our own freedom and dignity.

Now the gadgets and comfort is being taken away and we're suddenly mad as hell. I think I'm more mad at us than I am at Edward Liddy.

Who are you mad at?

The other day my professional collaborator, personal friend and communication-technology frenemy Shel Holtz blogged about a presenter at a communication conference who felt dizzy and sat down.

Instead of leaping up and calling 911 or dialing the hotel house phone, one attendee Tweeted the emergency, apparently hoping Seth Godin would know what the fuck to do.

A similarly Twitter-obsessed conference staffer saw the Tweet and ran down the hall and cleared the room. As it turned out, the presenter was suffering from travel exhaustion.

"Another unintended positive consequence of Twitter, wouldn’t you say?" Shel concluded.

No, another life endangered by some modern-day Walter Mitty's obsession with Twitter, I'd say.

The other reluctance we should all have about Twitter, even as we grudgingly accept its occasional social utility, is the Kurt Vonnegut Rule of Farting Around. "Electronic communities build nothing," my favorite humanist wrote near the end of his life. "You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you different." *

Now, Shel will argue till he's blue in the Facebook about all the world's wonders online communities have built. They build connections, of course. They unleash social potential. They help existing communities connect with other existing communities. They helped get Obama elected!

But communities themselves are built by common, shared myths, which are just symbolic and meaningful stories. And good stories require tactile human experience, things we can all relate to physically—hard falls, soggy shoes, dry mouths and tired arms. We'll recieve no Moby Dicks from Second Life, and in the six years since the popular advent of blogs, how many good books have been made from collections of blog posts?

Here's a test: Spend one day surfing the Internet and spend another roaming your neighborhood. See how many good dinner table stories you have after each. There won't be a contest.

"I’ve heard of people using Twitter to get help from people nearby," is a yarn Shel tells in his post about the Twittering numb nuts who saved the conference speaker who was fine to begin with. "Guy
Kawasaki needed a power cable for his laptop while staying (if memory
serves) at the Hotel del Coronado. A nearby resident read the tweet and
offered to drop by with a spare on his way to work."

As Hugh Grant would say, "Not exactly a classic anecdote, is it?"

* Vonnegut also said: "Do you know what a twerp is? When I was in Shortridge High School in Indianapolis 65 years ago, a twerp was a guy who stuck a set of false teeth up his butt and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs." And what do you have to say to that, Shel Holtz?

So this big rusty hulk has been parked around the corner from where I live for years. It always cracks me up because it's always parked in front of the tidiest little condo building I've ever seen, and I can imagine the neighbors cursing.

Of course, I appreciate this rig, being a four-wheel-drive kind of guy myself.

So one afternoon a couple of years ago, this guy and I happened to be at the local Marathon, pumping good gas after bad. I gave him a little nod and a grin. His contemptuous return stare said, "As if."