Living in the nation’s fourth largest city, scrabbling for shards of hope here and elsewhere, I contemplate American regime change and don’t find the least bit of hope there.

Sure, you can make the case the Bush government is dangerous, semi-dictatorial, and anti-constitutional beyond anything we’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever in this country. "Anybody but Bush" has a certain convincing gut appeal simply because four more years of Bush and the present rubber-stamp Congress and an increasingly rubber-stamp federal court system seem likely to lead us down a red, white, and blue primrose path which will be theocratic fascism is all but name.

Scared, come November I will no doubt pull the straight Democratic ticket lever (or, with naïve faith, punch the straight Democratic electronic voting button). But without much hope.

Any foreseeable future regime will be as much a reflection of American reality as is the present regime. And where does that get us? Fewer, slightly smaller, slightly more energy-efficient SUV’S? The burden of Iraq shared by a few more European friends? A little easing-off the rate at which we’re poisoning the planet? A tiny re-adjustment of the tax laws as if raising the top rate from 25% to 30% is going to hurt the really rich or help the really poor?

If this sounds like I’m talking myself into voting for Nader, I’m not. Talk about your lost causes.

The point I’m getting to is simple: Present and foreseeable future American regimes are strikingly (and embarrassingly) accurate reflections of American reality. "Bush World" (to borrow John Powers’s excellent term) is us, like it or not. But so too will be "Kerry World."

Nothing of significance will change—nothing—until we have got to the root of the problem and started doing something about it. And what is the root of the problem?

It’s the education, stupid.

It’s easy—and important—to see and clamor about the growing inequality of income distribution, and it’s pretty easy to see at least the more flagrant, obscene results of the inequality (gated golf-course communities, anyone?).

What’s less easy to see—though far more dangerous in the long run—is the reality effects of the three-tiered educational system we have in place now:

On this shaky foundation we think to build a true democracy?

With a grossly under-educated or uneducated populace that is breathtakingly susceptible to bread, circuses, religious, and media manipulation, we think to elect an effective, even-handed government?

An under-educated, uneducated electorate is one without hope or, worse still, with false hope ("I’m working at Wal-Mart for minimum wage but it is possible for ME to win the lottery"; "I’m failing high school but it is possible for me to becoming a starter in the NBA").

Who, in such an electorate, cares about the issues tearing this society apart? Such an electorate tries to find intermittent, fleeting value in bigoted, biased Sunday morning meetings, in ever-bigger, more-expensive acquisitions (SUV’s and pickups R Us), in the community of shared prejudice through media blowhards.

Without hope, what’s to care?

I live in a city of 5 million, a city of considerable wealth. Recently I was able to find out how many people in my city subscribe to the Sunday New York Times. Not that the Times is the be-all, end-all of political, cultural goodness and light. Far from it. But it’s the best we have.

Out of 5 million, how many, do you think, care enough to read weekly what some of our best journalists, reporters, writers, and thinkers are saying? Or, to put the question differently, how effective has the American education system been in producing a concerned, involved, thinking citizenry?