You know a strange wind is blowing across the moor when Neal Conan . . . Neal Conan! . . . via his normally decorous NPR program, Talk of the Nation, is soliciting the rage of the populace like he was on Thursday afternoon. The topic, of course, were those AIG bonuses, that one-tenth of one percent of the real load of dough that has set off every niche, corner, and pitchfork of the media and citizenry.

Later that day, President Obama, in a first, appeared on Jay Leno's set for a combination of policy and bon homie. The takeaway from that chat is that it seems Obama is calculating that now is the time to apply new (or, at long last, enforce old) regulations on American financial manipulators. Nothing could be more overdue or appropriate. But being a lot less patient than he is, I wish I had heard him tell Leno that his crack Treasury team has been noodling new regulations and oversight for months and that he's going to have the bill on Capitol Hill on Monday, you know, while literally everyone is blind with rage and determined to show the simple folks back home on Main Street that, by God, this time they're going to get tough on the bastards. Hell, even the most craven anti-tax Republicans were out there yesterday voting for massive tax increases on Wall Street predators. I tell you, madness is in the air!

With spring upon us and the ice sheet retreating, I made a quick run up to the Lambert redoubt to get in touch with my inner fake cowboy/agrarian, clearing brush and strutting around like I had more cattle than hat. The car time allowed me to catch New York Times's columnist Tom Friedman on Conan's Tuesday show. Friedman, who alternates between tediously self-important in his wisdom (extracted from regular tea with Saudi princes and such) and genuinely visionary about what is going down, got a little testy when a wing-nut got through the NPR screening net and accused him of being an agent for "the New World Order." (True crackpots are forever imagining liberals handing the keys to the country over to collection of Somali pirates, Russian oligarchs, and South American petro dictators). Friedman, who plainly enjoys his status as an unimpeachable International Man of Knowing, was this close to hanging up on both the caller and Conan.

Friedman's points, all repeated in Wednesday's column, is that the real new world order has nothing to do with any of us saluting the U.N. flag but rather understanding that we have hit two walls simultaneously: imaginary wealth and gross over-consumption. Because, you see, the over-leveraged casino economy ginned up by AIG financial wizards and their kin really is connected to the unsustainable, natural resource-sucking, "growth" economies of crap-producing Asia and big-box retailing America. Bad as it is right now, we're actually better off if neither is "made whole" in their former, wildly impractical glory.

Both "engines of growth" are now grinding to their inevitable decline and demise. What neither Friedman nor Conan's other guest, Columbia professor Charles Calomiris, got into on Conan's show was offering Obama advice on how exactly to break it to Americans raging (on misplaced principle) about a pittance in "bonuses" (which, while absurd by any real world standard, had nothing at all to do with performance) that we really have to stop hoping and praying that our "old world" (circa 2007) returns real soon and start actively planning for something far . . . far . . . more monitored and sustainable.

While up north, I bought the latest issue of Vanity Fair, something I read only three or four times a year. (I just don't care where the latest heir to the Rothschild fortune is wintering this season.) But this one was a keeper. Until the inevitable books start flowing, there may be no better view into an uber culture we would all do better without, or at least should stop fawning and salivating over like desperate teenagers consuming luxury porn, than Vicky Ward's feature, "Greenwich Mean Time." It is the suddenly tragic tale of the fabulous Noel family; their five, fabulous, long-limbed blond daughters; their fabulous homes; and the fabulous lack of due diligence that had their perfect WASPY noses pressed so deeply into Bernie Madoff's butt. Even better is Michael "Moneyball" Lewis's piece on Iceland's collapse, "Wall Street on the Tundra," with the takeaway that Iceland's apocalyptic belly flop had everything to do with the absolute control of one nearly all-male political party/business elite and its uncritical reliance on the theories of every conservative's favorite economist, Milton Friedman. (And how did that work out for them . . . and us?)

During the campaign, Obama ignored my sage advice and declined to attack John McCain as a nearly senile old hack without a single fresh idea and a pandering streak as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. Instead, he played it dignified and cool. Now, I'm saying he needs to exploit the hell out this "populist rage" and not just lay on the regulation and oversight that diverts American capitalism away from our very oligarchical casino mentality to sustainable manufacturing and service—but also have a couple heart-to-hearts with, well, the whole world.

He needs to exploit the moment and the reassuring informalities of popular media and convince us that the money we've been spending on Chinese-made crap and over-the-top luxuries (so that we could effect the airs and appearances of the fabulous Noels and other super-elites) is far better spent on common infrastructure and services.

He's been saying all this for years, and he got elected by a handsome margin for saying it all through the campaign, but he needs to seize more Joe Sixpack forums like The Tonight Show and, maybe with a digital version of Ross Perot's pie charts, explain to the royally pissed-off general public exactly how health care, green energy, and bank "bailouts" are all connected and how a pissant $165 million is a distraction in the context of AIG using taxpayers' money to essentially pay off Goldman Sachs', CitiGroup's, etc. gambling debts.