A couple of days ago I spent a hot Madrid summer evening sitting in a sidewalk café, chatting and reminiscing around the ruins of a fine meal, with a group of Americans from San Francisco that are making a film about a close friend of mine, someone who died many years ago. They had completed principal photography and this was their last night in Spain.

You might say they was a good cross section of modern progressive, middle class America: the director was a 3rd generation, Chinese-American. His wife, the sound technician, who might have one African ancestor out of sixteen or less, considers herself African-American and the cameraperson was an Irish-American and looked the part. Accompanying them were the two elderly (older than me) second generation, Chinese-American brothers of my departed buddy. Like I say, a fair mix of today's educated, progressive America.

The reason I am providing so much context is because, late into the evening the talk turned to the Greek debt crisis, which led to Goldman Sachs' role in cooking Greece's books in order for them to enter the Euro, which is the origin of their problems today. At the mention of Goldman Sachs, there settled over the conversation a type of silent, ice-cold murderous hatred that I don't associate with middle class America. A very "un-American" type of hatred; as if you mentioned the Chinese to a Filipino or the Serbians to a Croatian or the Germans to an elderly Jewish person... not an outburst of eyeball-popping expletives, just something hard and cold and deadly, more like the Balkans or of people who fought the Spanish Civil War, than any educated, progressive, middle-America I have ever known.

Observing this change of mood... its depth and coldness, for the first time in many years I got the urge to return to the states and take a trans-continental bus ride, while I still can, and just listen to Americans talk, unfiltered by the media and the system. I got the feeling which I really cannot confirm from here, that the entire system, from the Wall Street encumbered, Obama administration to Michele Bachmann's clown-shop Tea Party are only acting out a farce to distract people from the whiff of cold hatred I picked up that night.

I don't know who would have the nerve to do it, but I got the feeling that the politician who promises to put Lloyd Blankfein and all who sail in him in jail with Bernie Madoff, for the rest of their lives, might sweep the polls in 2012. There is definitely the smell of blood in the air.