Even our drunk-driving reforms have their downside. Heartening was the crusade of California housewife Candy Lightner, who created Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 1980 after her daughter died in a crash. Hundreds of MADD chapters soon formed, without an Internet to spread the word. Within a year, a panoply of local, state and federal laws against driving while intoxicated had been passed. D.W.I. deaths plunged from 78 a day in 1980 to 44 by 1998. And MADD’s campaign inspired related attacks on reckless driving, from traffic cameras to record the license plates of speeders to a New Mexico reform that should be a national one: banning “drive-in” liquor stores. Still, drunk drivers caused 16,694 of our 42,636 highway deaths in 2004.

When Japan’s highway death rate rose to half of ours in 1992, it declared a national alert. Meanwhile, Washington did away with the national speed limit of 55 miles an hour. Alarmed by just 200 monthly car accidents caused by cell phones, Japan banned all keitei from cars in 1999. Our recent bans on handheld calls are useless, with studies showing similar crash rates for hands-free phones.

A strong voice for driving reform was President George W. Bush’s former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Jeffrey W. Runge, a longtime E.R. doctor. Calling our highway carnage “obscene,” he suggested that drunk drivers causing deaths “be treated as taboo, the same as child molesters.” He also attacked Detroit for S.U.V. rollovers that take 2,000 lives a year. “I wouldn’t let my kid buy … a rollover vehicle if it was the last one on earth,” he told a Detroit audience in 2003. Within a month, Detroit pledged to lower S.U.V. and light truck frames to lessen their impacts on passenger cars—and add more air bags and reinforced doors to defend cars against such tanks.

Such things happen when Washington takes highway safety seriously.

Two very American driving problems were foreseen in Bette Davis’ only singing film role when, in Warner Brothers’ all-star war effort of 1944, Hollywood Canteen, she huskily bemoaned the slim pickings on the home front. “They’re either too young or too old,” she sang. “They’re either too gray or too grassy green.”

At least older drivers with experience are much safer than youths with next to none. Still, as overall driving deaths were falling after 1989, they soared among seniors, reflecting a sharp growth in the number of drivers over 75 years of age, many with reduced dexterity and vision. Cowed by senior voting blocs and the almighty AARP, politicians mainly look the other way. Elderly drivers in Florida’s retirement mecca may go almost two decades between license recertifications, with the state settling for palliatives like bigger street signs or more-visible lane lines.

While a dozen states have age limits for automatic license renewals, California, home to many seniors, does not. Thus a recent notorious tragedy, when an 87-year-old driver confused the brake and gas pedals at a Los Angeles farmers’ market and killed 10 pedestrians. In the late 1990’s, when then–State Senator Tom Hayden urged age-specific license tests after a similar tragedy, the AARP yelled “age discrimination.” After the carnage at the farmers’ market, Mr. Hayden said he blamed the AARP and its “reactionary attitude.”

Another problem involving older drivers is a sharp rise in motorcycle deaths. Affluent, aging baby boomers have raised the median biker age from 27 years in 1985 to 41 today. And while 20 states mandate helmets, the others don’t (including Pennsylvania, which is why Steelers’ quarterback Ben Roethlisberger wasn’t wearing one when he was in an accident in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago). There has been an 85 percent jump in highway motorcycle fatalities since 1997.

As with banning all cell phones and restoring a national speed limit, Washington should mandate helmets for all motorcyclists of any age. For the elderly, it should require regular state license recertifications for drivers 70 years old and older.

The AARP has it right about “discrimination”: States must discriminate between good and bad drivers among elderly operators of potentially lethal machines. Given the AARP’s clout, however, this may not happen until senior driving deaths really take off, as 74 million baby boomers retire in four years.

Meanwhile, there’s the far bigger disaster of far too many teenage drivers, which I’ll deal with in my next column.

While racial sideshows play on the media’s stages, economic divisions widen in the wings. The curtain gets raised at times—as in the brief concern about All Those Poor People Uprooted by Katrina. But that was followed by Congress cutting $40 billion in programs for the disadvantaged.

Troubled cultures often long for golden ages. In The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter recalled how the rapid growth of new, disruptive industries in the early 19th century inspired nostalgia for the town meetings and village greens of rural Jeffersonian democracy. So it goes with our view of King as a civil-rights icon—a nation that was abandoning its poor in the 1980’s rushed forward to celebrate King’s birthday as a national holiday.

Roman history has a curious precedent for this: the Emperor Augustus using a long-dead freedom fighter to bury, while praising, lost freedoms. Two decades earlier, Cato the Younger’s suicide had ended republican resistance to Julius Caesar. To justify his new tyranny, the first Caesar issued an anti-Cato pamphlet. A generation later, the second Caesar contrived his own contrasting brochure. “In this Augustan revision,” wrote Ronald Syme in The Roman Revolution, “Cato, always an admirer of ordered government, would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the New State … safe from despotism and restored to Libertas.” So powerful an emblem was the last Roman rebel’s example that George Washington even staged a play about Cato (by the 18th-century English essayist and poet Joseph Addison) to rally his winter soldiers at Valley Forge.

A similar transformation has overtaken our own most revered “Cato.” We forget how, at his death, King was largely ignored, his Poor People’s Campaign headed for probable failure in Washington. Though it was revived after his assassination, poverty soon faded from our politics, as the left’s energies were diffused among new, middle-class causes like consumerism, ecology, feminism and gay rights.

“I’m a liberal on social issues, but conservative in fiscal affairs” went the new code words for ditching the poor. As the Other America became poorer, more forgotten, more disorganized—more other—King Day reassurances about better race relations took off, not to mention a new “diversity” bureaucracy at our leading corporations and universities.

A shrewd tactician, King’s stress on nonviolence, on turning the other cheek, helped the fast advance of civil rights. He was also the wise strategist who, while scorning “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” reined in hopes for economic justice to unite the broad coalition for the triumphs of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But he never forgot his goal of equity for all. Four years after the “Dream” speech, he pointedly noted: “It is much easier to integrate a local community than it is to integrate economically …. We have moved from a struggle for decency … to a struggle for genuine equality.”

King’s poor are forgotten today as race melodramas divide poor whites and blacks who might unite for changes like a living wage or tax reforms favoring the middle and working classes. Meanwhile, even our mainstream is struggling to stay afloat amid a rising tide of inequalities.

Even before President Bush expanded class gaps with his record tax cuts, inequality had soared over the previous two decades. Where our top fifth earned 7.7 times what our bottom fifth did in 1980, they earned 11.4 times as much in 2001.

Meanwhile, we open new golden parachutes for inept C.E.O.’s. What a contrast with Japan Air Lines, where a $102.4 million loss in 2005 meant the following wage cuts: Eight percent for lower management and labor, 12 percent for senior managers—and a 23 to 40 percent cut for J.A.L. board members, including chief executive Toshiyuki Shimata.

In 1996, Bill Clinton virtually repealed Franklin Roosevelt’s main safety net for the poor under the guise of “welfare reform.” That was quite a contrast with an actual Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, who exploded in frustration over economic equality. According to his aide, Richard Goodwin, Johnson once said, “I’m sick of all the people who talk about things we can’t do. Hell, we’re the richest country in the world …. We can do it if we believe it …. You just have to get full of your subject and let it fly.”

That spirit of “letting it fly” was the larger reality of Martin Luther King Jr., and one we tend to forget. Instead, we’ve had five years of relentless assaults on economic fairness by a Republican President and Congress, attacks worthy of Cato the Elder’s harsh demand that Carthage be destroyed. Faltering Democrats beguiled by social issues must finally launch a sustained drive for economic justice to revive the old, triumphant electoral coalitions that backed the New Deal and the Great Society—the truest way to honor one of America’s most prophetic leaders.

While racial sideshows play on the media’s stages, economic divisions widen in the wings. The curtain gets raised at times—as in the brief concern about All Those Poor People Uprooted by Katrina. But that was followed by Congress cutting $40 billion in programs for the disadvantaged.

Troubled cultures often long for golden ages. In The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter recalled how the rapid growth of new, disruptive industries in the early 19th century inspired nostalgia for the town meetings and village greens of rural Jeffersonian democracy. So it goes with our view of King as a civil-rights icon—a nation that was abandoning its poor in the 1980’s rushed forward to celebrate King’s birthday as a national holiday.

Roman history has a curious precedent for this: the Emperor Augustus using a long-dead freedom fighter to bury, while praising, lost freedoms. Two decades earlier, Cato the Younger’s suicide had ended republican resistance to Julius Caesar. To justify his new tyranny, the first Caesar issued an anti-Cato pamphlet. A generation later, the second Caesar contrived his own contrasting brochure. “In this Augustan revision,” wrote Ronald Syme in The Roman Revolution, “Cato, always an admirer of ordered government, would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the New State … safe from despotism and restored to Libertas.” So powerful an emblem was the last Roman rebel’s example that George Washington even staged a play about Cato (by the 18th-century English essayist and poet Joseph Addison) to rally his winter soldiers at Valley Forge.

A similar transformation has overtaken our own most revered “Cato.” We forget how, at his death, King was largely ignored, his Poor People’s Campaign headed for probable failure in Washington. Though it was revived after his assassination, poverty soon faded from our politics, as the left’s energies were diffused among new, middle-class causes like consumerism, ecology, feminism and gay rights.

“I’m a liberal on social issues, but conservative in fiscal affairs” went the new code words for ditching the poor. As the Other America became poorer, more forgotten, more disorganized—more other—King Day reassurances about better race relations took off, not to mention a new “diversity” bureaucracy at our leading corporations and universities.

A shrewd tactician, King’s stress on nonviolence, on turning the other cheek, helped the fast advance of civil rights. He was also the wise strategist who, while scorning “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” reined in hopes for economic justice to unite the broad coalition for the triumphs of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But he never forgot his goal of equity for all. Four years after the “Dream” speech, he pointedly noted: “It is much easier to integrate a local community than it is to integrate economically …. We have moved from a struggle for decency … to a struggle for genuine equality.”

King’s poor are forgotten today as race melodramas divide poor whites and blacks who might unite for changes like a living wage or tax reforms favoring the middle and working classes. Meanwhile, even our mainstream is struggling to stay afloat amid a rising tide of inequalities.

Even before President Bush expanded class gaps with his record tax cuts, inequality had soared over the previous two decades. Where our top fifth earned 7.7 times what our bottom fifth did in 1980, they earned 11.4 times as much in 2001.

Meanwhile, we open new golden parachutes for inept C.E.O.’s. What a contrast with Japan Air Lines, where a $102.4 million loss in 2005 meant the following wage cuts: Eight percent for lower management and labor, 12 percent for senior managers—and a 23 to 40 percent cut for J.A.L. board members, including chief executive Toshiyuki Shimata.

In 1996, Bill Clinton virtually repealed Franklin Roosevelt’s main safety net for the poor under the guise of “welfare reform.” That was quite a contrast with an actual Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, who exploded in frustration over economic equality. According to his aide, Richard Goodwin, Johnson once said, “I’m sick of all the people who talk about things we can’t do. Hell, we’re the richest country in the world …. We can do it if we believe it …. You just have to get full of your subject and let it fly.”

That spirit of “letting it fly” was the larger reality of Martin Luther King Jr., and one we tend to forget. Instead, we’ve had five years of relentless assaults on economic fairness by a Republican President and Congress, attacks worthy of Cato the Elder’s harsh demand that Carthage be destroyed. Faltering Democrats beguiled by social issues must finally launch a sustained drive for economic justice to revive the old, triumphant electoral coalitions that backed the New Deal and the Great Society—the truest way to honor one of America’s most prophetic leaders.

One such foreign helper has been Intel founder Andrew S. Grove, who came here after the Soviet repression in Hungary. Mr. Grove has warned of future Asian challenges in information technology by using one striking comparison: In the U.S., 5 percent of college students major in engineering or science, but about 30 to 40 percent of Asian students do. All nine members of China's ruling Politburo have engineering degrees.

Too few tech hands here meant big personnel shortages during the late-1990's dot-com boom. Just before the bubble burst in 2000, even Washington's emergency doubling of H 1-B visas for specialized foreign workers to 195,000 that year couldn't fill our tech gap.

This shortage led to a recent I.B.M. invention from necessity, after customers noted growing gaps between the I.T. they managed and workers able to run it. Enter Big Blue's advances in autonomous computing, where machines spot, then correct, faulty entries. With such ingenuities, our tech lead holds, and so I.B.M.'s first supercomputer is 10 times faster than Japan's NEC Earth Simulator. But where are the U.S. citizens to create and operate such marvels? A 2001 survey by the National Assessment of Education Progress found that 82 percent of our high-school seniors lacked science proficiency. "Our hopes for a strong 21st century are dimming," warned Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige.

And it's not just Asian upstarts like China and India that are threatening our tech lead. Old Europe has taken giant steps, too. The number of patents filed with the European Union increased by 75 percent from 1995 to 2000. In Belgium, Louvain University's engineering school recently spun off almost 50 companies. In 2001, two Louvain students beat both I.B.M. and Japan's N.T.T. to develop an encryption technology for the … U.S. National Security Agency (which, curiously, is the world's biggest employer of mathematicians).

Two years ago, Mr. Grove noted that China's 476,000 graduate degrees in science in 2002 equaled all of our graduate degrees that year. Mr. Grove also said that he didn't see the "hunger" here which drove him to found the world's leader in semiconductors.

Two decades after the federal government released its Nation at Risk report about the state of education, SAT scores have barely risen and science proficiencies are on the decline. Despite its wise focus on disadvantaged children, President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" Act remains woefully underfunded.

More than a half-century has passed since Rudolph Flesch's surprise 1951 best-seller about the phonics method of reading instruction, Why Johnny Can't Read. Six years later, the Soviet Union took the lead in the space race by launching Sputnik, inspiring a major hike in federal spending for science teaching. For a while, Washington's investment paid off. Rising science scores through 1968 reflected the increased resources, as well as Great Society landmarks like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. But then Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" yielded to the war in Vietnam. SAT scores fell, inner-city and rural schools became more obsolete and more crowded, and too many low-income households fell apart.

Just before A Nation at Risk appeared in 1983, Flesch's popular sequel would be plaintively titled Why Johnny Still Can't Read.

Today, when one in four adults lacks reading proficiency, one thing seems likely: Without dramatic changes in the schools that should be educating future engineers, mathematicians and scientists, we near the grim day when, too often, Johnny may never read.

Our poor job of educating tech professionals produced a brief travesty in 2000, when a shortage of math and science teachers for New York's public schools led to 50 being flown in from Austria to plug the gap. "Why are we importing mathematicians and scientists when we have them here?" wondered a teacher quoted in a television report on the Summer Schools Academy of New York City, where ambitious public-school students spend their vacations taking advanced math and science courses. As the teacher asked his question, the television camera panned around the classroom to reveal that virtually all his students seemed to be Asian-Americans.

Many of those students may have been recent arrivals, driven here by the "hunger" that drove Andrew Grove. But until more black, Latino and white faces, male or female, appear in such advanced courses, we'll keep importing skilled tech workers and entrepreneurs from Europe, India or that very populous dictatorship ruled by nine commissars with engineering degrees.