Mike Tyson is no measure for the progress of African-Americans since the days when Martin Luther King shouted his dream of a just world from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He's rough, crude, dangerous. You watch him fight as Victorians watched freaks in a travelling circus, hearing his grunts, watching the sweat roll over him so copiously you think you see the salt.
Fifty years ago in Tennessee or Alabama, he might have been horsewhipped for having the gall to exist. Now, this is a guy you can hate for the price of a cable fee or an admission charge, if that is how you are inclined.
Today in the US, on Martin Luther King Day, it is Tyson who makes news. It is Tyson the punters want to talk about. Like Francois Botha, Tyson's boxing opponent yesterday, Martin Luther King is history. These days, that can be an insult.
Martin Luther King Day is an anniversary that always makes Capitol Hill feel good. A day for human rights. A day for peace. Introduced in 1986 after years of lobbying, it reassures the US and the world that the principles of freedom and liberty Dr King fought for remain the primary business of the United States. This despite the bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan.
You can't dispute the progress made from the days of that "hey boy" society into which King was born. Although it may not be politically correct to wolf whistle at a woman, as did 14-year-old Emmett Till one hot Mississippi day in 1955, at least you won't be dragged out of your house, pistol-whipped, tied with barbed wire to a cotton gin, shot in the head and then thrown in the river for doing so.
But you can wonder whether this day counts more as a sign of nostalgia than a keynote theme for the present. As an African-American, you are twice as likely to be unemployed, seven times more likely to be killed by police, destined to earn no more than half the average income earned by the ethnic majority - all this without taking into account higher childhood mortality and life expectancy rates.
Even if you do take heart in realising that most young Americans of whatever ethnic background will now pay lip-service to the language of a "hey bro" culture - through language, clothes, music - you won't rest any easier knowing that just one year from the millennium, half of all white Americans believe equal rights in general have been pushed too far.
And as many commentators are noting, if you read the current impeachment proceedings against President Clinton as an endurance test for the principles Dr King espoused, you may become genuinely alarmed. On this day of celebration more than on any other since Ronald Reagan made it legal, pluralism itself would appear to be on trial.
But taking sides is not as clear-cut as it may have been in the 1960s. Then, you could by all accounts be anti-establishment and be Christian too. Now, the official voices of American Christianity appear to shout loudest from the "other" side.
In life, King was a spiritual stallion who talked about non-violent "creative protest" and "the audacity to believe" with a passion that sent after-shocks around the world. His words, spoken on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, still resonate as inspiration not only to African-Americans but to a world finding it ever more difficult to believe that political protest can actually deliver results.
"No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream . . . This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning `My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.' And if America is to become a great nation, this must become true."
That language still challenges the status quo. But in a strange sense Dr King's message risks being gelded for precisely the reasons that made him so strong. He spoke as a Christian. Now, that Christian faith may cloud his legacy in a manner he could never have anticipated.
Unlike him, other leading African-American activists of the 1960s found it impossible to develop their own cultural identity if they remained Christian. Malcolm X and Tyson's forefather Muhammad Ali both converted to Islam. Thus did they distance themselves from Capitol Hill, and all the establishment values it represented to them. Hundreds of thousands of young African-Americans chose likewise.
King should be celebrated. But only on his own terms. The man who refused to be discouraged by what he called "the ambiguities of history" is deservedly the first secular hero to be celebrated since George Washington, that US president who could not tell a lie.
Yet it may in fact have been mighty "white" of Ronald Reagan and his bureaucrats to make King's birthday a legal holiday. It offered the Capitol Hill establishment a handy Christian ally by providing them with a means to separate King's substance from his style, and thus to deaden his innately provocative ideals.
With Islam becoming to Capitol Hill as communism was to McCarthy, King's inclusiveness was blunted to a point where Congress, feeling it had done its duty, could turn its back on the hundreds of thousands of perhaps misguided, but certainly needy, young men who, like Tyson, figure they can express their identity as African-Americans only by becoming members of the nation of Islam.
Writing from Birmingham Jail to clergymen critical of his role in challenging the system, Martin Luther King quoted a poet whose WASP background sounded in every word he spoke. "As T.S. Eliot has said: `The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.' "
Some find Mike Tyson's anger entirely unprofessional. Many perceive it as a threat. But to him and his difficult, perplexing, problematic community, the bombing of their brothers in Sudan and Afghanistan by the pluralist President Clinton must have seemed like the final outrage. That it could happen without the merest sign of scruple speaks particularly on this day.