I once worked for a man who got angry in all the wrong places. Commit some awful, indefensible cock-up and he’d sigh and shoo you away. But forget to double-space your printout or leave coffee-cup rings on a desk and, quite randomly, you could detonate a cluster bomb of his wrath.

This strategy for venting impotent rage at big intractable problems by railing against the little stuff, reminds me of the public fury at Jimmy Carr’s joke. “Say what you like about these servicemen amputees from Afghanistan,” he said. “But we’re going to have a f****** good Paralympic team in 2012.”

Say what you like about Jimmy Carr — that he is dead-hearted, amoral, pens low and lazy gags about Gypsies and women loving rape because he feels no responsibility beyond extracting a laugh — but this is a black and savagely funny joke.

It makes you gasp, recoil; it forces a grimacing smile. Because it is true. All those beautiful young men, at the very peak of their physical potential, having lean and muscled limbs blown away by roadside mines, yet still full of vim and courage, will indeed strap their stumps into springed sprinter’s prosthetics or use those beefy shoulders, which once carried 100lb packs and fallen comrades, to bring home for Britain a wheelchair basketball gold.

Which is the bigger outrage — a joke made about amputees or that, every day in Afghanistan, fresh amputees are made? Carr declined to reflect on why he is being hounded, except to say “there is a climate . . .”. Indeed there is a climate right now, censorious and bullying: it kicks up an intoxicating cloud of hate that only obscures what lies beneath.

It is evident in the poppy police, a moral force that every autumn assumes wider powers, now insisting that Remembrance corsages be appliquéd to football teams’ strips.

It is assumed to be self-evident that those who decline, or simply forget, to poppy up must be against Our Brave Boys. In our age of charity ribbons and rubber wristbands, where parental love is most fully expressed in a child’s name tattoo, it is no longer sufficient that a belief be carried in the heart: it must be writ large on the body too.

Our poppy paranoia recalls America’s judgment of its politicians’ patriotism based on their wearing a Stars-and-Stripes lapel pin — causing Sarah Palin to sport an enamelled Old Glory the size of a pop tart — or Iran’s modesty police, who chase women with nightsticks for daring to show a lock of hair.

It is easier to focus on outward symbols and comedic infractions than on an interminable eight-year war. On Wednesday morning, hearing that five soldiers had been machinegunned down, unarmed and, with exquisite patriotic poignancy, drinking tea, I assumed that this would be the tipping point for protest.

This summer we have grown deaf to the drip of death. “Relatives have been informed”, homilies about a “true soldier” or a “beloved father” have become media wallpaper, just as “killed on patrol in Belfast” was during the Troubles. But that day, five young men had been slain by an Afghan whom they had trusted and trained. One ghastly vignette contained the whole unwinnability of this war. Surely a march must have been convened, banners made. Through Twitter hash-tags and return-tweets, early snowflakes of outrage would be consolidated into an unstoppable avalanche.

Actually, Twitter was too busy making up film titles involving cows (Die Herd, The Bovine Identity) to type “#stopthewar”. This mighty virtual force, so giddy with its own power when it blew open the Trafigura injunction and brought a newspaper to account over a homophobic article, was strangely dormant. Stephen Fry was tweeting vacuously from a chat show in LA.

Modern protesters bore easily, demand instant results. If a cause can’t be won in the time that it takes to type “Jan Moir is Satan”, post her home address on the interweb or join a hateful group on Facebook, it isn’t worth fighting. Strange that an immoderate pitchforks-and-torches mentality has become the default setting not only of the Daily Mail but also of the tech-addicted liberals who abhor it.

Anger is dissipated into inviting side-roads, while the two mighty issues that afflict our democracy — war and the failure to regulate the banks who broke our economy — are almost unaddressed. Since the mass anti-Iraq march of 2003 the stop-the-war movement has dwindled into a far-left rump. Even now, when a YouGov poll shows that 73 per cent of British people want troops out of Afghanistan, where is the lobbying and activism, the outspoken voices — ordinary and celebrity — who might push Gordon Brown’s rumblings this week about conditions for withdrawal into action?

Likewise, why is no politician apart from Vince Cable keeping up a relentless critique of the banks, whose entire system was saved by the taxpayer yet which now insist it is business as usual? Goldman Sachs is handing out juicy Christmas bonuses, while the bankers at the almost-state-run RBS are squealing off to head-hunters because they have to wait a couple of years for theirs. Don’t they feel any responsibility? Can’t they see that the only bit of the economy that has bobbed back up is the stock market — 677,000 people have lost their jobs this year, 130,000 will be declared insolvent and 75,000 people face repossession of their homes.

It got our blood up, produced gratifyingly easy scalps, pursuing MPs for duck houses and dog food. It was too complicated, too hard on the old attention span, to bring to account the slippery charlatans who stole our billions. Perhaps the lack of sustained rage against the City is down to a deliberate obfuscation of the facts. “You little people,” say the bankers, “can’t comprehend the algorithms of international finance. Just remember one thing: how critical it is we’re paid egregious sums even when we’ve failed.”

A few weeks ago I watched Michael Moore’s new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story at the London Film Festival. It was the “surprise movie” — you turn up with no idea what will be shown — otherwise I might not have gone.

Like many, I’d grown weary of Moore’s blue-collar shtick, standing outside Evil Inc, yelling on a bullhorn at faceless plutocrats who refuse to let him in. But the cinema fell into silent concentration. Someone was spelling out in clear, cogent terms the banks’ monumental deceit. Here was anger, at long last, about the big stuff. And, boy, did it feel right.

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