Goldman Sachs (GS), which announced epic quarterly profits last week, has an obvious PR problem on its hands. The firm is being savaged left and right. And given the traditionally esoteric and rather secretive nature of its business, it’s difficult for the investment bank turned bank-bank to get the public to cut it a break. After all, who had even heard of Goldman Sachs even a year ago, really? Now everyone has, and more than a whiff of opportunistic evil has clung to the firm.

There’s a cultural logic to all this bad press, however. Goldman’s biggest problem isn’t that it took bailout funds, engineered the overnight rescue of American International Group (AIG) so that it wouldn’t cease to exist, and transformed itself into a normal bank so that it would no longer be subject to the increasingly dire vicissitudes of the credit-drunk, overleveraged I-banking world. No, Goldman’s biggest problem is that we don’t really have General Motors (MTLQQ) to kick around anymore.

For pretty much the entire postwar period, but mostly during the post-1970s gas-crisis era, GM served as a convenient target for generalized hatred of the business world. This is because GM was always a marketing and management colossus first and a carmaker second. This was the ingenious creation of the company’s most famous president, Alfred Sloan. Under his guidance, GM was organized into the world’s first truly great corporation. Throughout the history of the car business, there have always been mad dreamers devoted to glorious—or quixotic—machines. John DeLorean. Preston Tucker. Enzo Ferrari. Even GM’s original driving force, William Durant. But when it comes to actually running a huge company that builds, markets, and sells complex contraptions, business interests tend to take over.

Obviously, at one point this enabled GM to own half the U.S. auto market and fund the pensions and health benefits of so many retirees that, when those retirees started living too long, the obligations became ruinous for a company that was once called “Generous Motors.” Eventually, as the Japanese and German automakers penetrated the U.S. market, GM’s product came in for criticism. Sometime in the 1980s, the public decided that GM didn’t make good cars any more. Then along came Roger & Me, and the public decided that GM was out to screw the common man. When the EV1 was canned in the 1990s, it was because GM was in the pocket of Big Oil. When the SUV backlash happened in the 2000s, we concluded that GM was destroying the environment.

GM took all this negative PR in stride. Over time, in fact, the company seemed to kind of Zen-out on it. Everything it did was tempered by the understanding that it was going to take its lumps. Still, GM was like a dreadnought, afloat on the sea of international commerce. It was designed to take many, many hits.

Until, finally, in 2008-9, spiking gas prices, the financial crisis, and the credit crunch came together to form a mega-bomb that sank the old ship. GM slipped beneath the waves of bankruptcy and, for the first time in generations, became an object of pity rather than contempt. When the Dow finally broke 10,000 again last week, there was no GM in the index. That hadn’t been the case since 1925.

This created a vast hole in a nation’s psychographic landscape. Corporate hatred has to go someplace, and it was just so easy to hate GM (even if, like many consumers, you liked some of its cars and trucks). Hating GM was like hating bad weather! Like hating going to the dentist! Like hating the end of summer vacation! And GM didn't much mind being hated. It was prepared to accept the hatred in exchange for ... well, for being General Motors.

Enter Goldman and all its Dan-Brown-meets-Niall-Ferguson backroom dealings, its impenetrable social codes, its apparently immense influence on the hapless workings of government, its otherworldly exemption from the business cycle, its ranks of supersmart, utterly fearless (although plenty would say reckless) employees, rewarded for their exertions with bonuses that defy mortal gravity. Its Bat Phone to the Treasury Secretary’s desk. Its hidden moon base. Its private submarine. What an ideal villain!

And a postmodern one, at that. Part of the reason why GM was so good for so long at being the company we loved to hate was that it possessed a sort of easygoing Detroit diffidence. “Sure, people hate us. We can live with that. Much as we shifted from building cars and trucks during the war years, so can we settle into our role as the Always Vaguely Hated One. It’s our patriotic obligation.”

Goldman is not filling this vacuum with such calm repose. Goldman isn’t really doing anything, in fact, except continuing to be Goldman and hoping the whole thing will blow over. Or not hoping. There’s a level at which Goldman doesn’t seem to care.

Like it or not, however, Goldman needs to start caring. GM will never be “The General” again. The baton has been passed. We decided long ago that we wanted an economy based on services, on transactions, and the swift application of intelligence, rather than an economy based on the hot forge and the putting together of physical things. That economy of zeros and ones needs a default Bad Guy, just as the economy of materials and manufacture needed a Bad Guy. Goldman is the Bad Guy. Goldman should get used to it. But more to the point, Goldman should embrace what it has become.