Just this past Saturday, AlJazeera reported again what has now become a commonplace not only of the Arab Street, but of those dark and crooked passages on the World Beat where those who are not with us are against us: the US, in case you haven't heard it yet, is a terrorist state run by a Terrorist in Chief. This time, the charge comes from Venezualan President Chavez, who makes the charge in response to "Washington's criticism of Caracas for its arms purchase from Russia."

Such rhetoric isn't without its uses Stateside, either. Some Bush detractors move too readily from accusing the Bush Administration of contemplating a reinstatement of the draft to the erosion of any number of American freedoms, especially those touched upon by the Patriot Act. Of course, such pressures for accountability have value. All levels of US government and military must work to ensure that civil liberties of American Citizens are respected and the human rights of our detainees are maintained in these difficult times. Critics and watchdogs keep industries in check. However, when rhetoric such as the above is exaggerated or overused for political ends, it effectively cries wolf. And, when those who dish out such exaggerations come to believe it themselves, they lose all credibility with the Administration's rational critics. They take up with the lunatic fringe, and become the equivalent of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

The problem with left-wing conspiracy theories is that they aren't limited to characterizing the US as a Terrorist State. It's that they tend to be based on sloppy, morally indignant claims (that I get in my students' essays regularly), which is that the US has not and cannot redeem itself from its history of slavery, colonization, sexual discrimination, racism, and so on. Things today, the old saw goes, are as bad as they ever were. Things over here, some go on to add, are as bad as they are over there -- in Russia, for instance.

Well, no they're not.

I'm no apologist for US historical slavery, colonization, sexual discrimination, racism, corporate abuses, or bully policies elsewhere in the world or any of those practices still surviving. By all means, let's have social justice in our democracy, and let's ensure that others, who are less fortunate and able than ourselves, nationally speaking, have a crack at it, too. But let's not forget our advantages, either. Let's admit that most of us, even our low-wage earners, are incredibly lucky to have been born US citizens, with the advantages of our civil liberties, our economy, our federal benefits. Let's kiss the flag and touch this US soil with a little extra appreciation for how good we've got it compared to, well, just about everybody else.

Take this for an instance. We no doubt all recall the bogeyman of the renewed draft that was drawn out by the left before the American electorate. Bush will do it, they argued, whether he'll admit it before election or not. He has to, they added, He just can't fight a war on this many fronts without it. After all, at heart, he's a fascist. Fascist, communist -- no matter what direction a dictator comes from, they always meet in the totalitarian middle.

Which is just where Russia is now, at least on the question of the draft. In a little reported news item (source: Chronicle of Higher Education 2/11/05 by Bryon MacWilliams):

The Russian military raided college dormitories in the nation's capital last month, rousing many young men from their beds, in a surprise effort to find fresh conscripts following the cancellation of deferments from mandatory service.

Agents of the city's office of military registration and enlistment fanned out through dorms across Moscow the day after the conclusion of the New Year's and Old Christmas holiday period, during which the government announced that all draft deferrals would be canceled.

The raids were intended to catch students unawares. Recruitment officers, each accompanied by two police officers, sometimes dragged students from their beds, according to the newspaper Versiya.

Some students were taken directly to medical clinics to undergo physical examinations, reportedly in violation of a federal law that requires supporting documents from the place of study and allows young men up to three days to contest their conscription.

Konstantin Kudryavtsev, an assistant dean in the chemistry department at Moscow State University, said in an open letter that two students had been awakened at 7 a.m. and taken under guard for physicals even though they had been enrolled in the university's military courses -- a status that, by law, entitles them to deferments.

Full-time students had been excluded from the mandatory two-year stints since 1989. But the minister of defense, Sergei Ivanov, announced on December 30 that all draft deferrals would be abandoned, including those granted to college students.

Only 9.5 percent of the 176,000 men eligible for the draft last fall are serving in the military. In 1994 some 27 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 27 served, according to the general staff of the Russian armed forces. The military, comprising some 1.2 million troops, reportedly was short more than 31,000 recruits last fall.

Young men pursued higher education throughout the 1990s as a means to avoid serving in the demoralized and underfinanced military, where conscripts are routinely denied basic medical care and adequate food. Human-rights groups have reported that beatings and violence, often in hazing rituals, kill hundreds of conscripts annually.

Desertion and even suicide among the troops are endemic and well documented. But parents fear most that their sons will be sent to fight in the war-torn Republic of Chechnya.

Alternative forms of service are poorly developed and are opposed by the armed forces. The Kremlin plans to reduce the mandatory term of service to one year in 2008, but only if "everyone" serves, according to Mr. Ivanov.

President Vladimir Putin hinted that the abolition of deferments was not final at a meeting with college students in Moscow late last month.

The minister of education and science, Andrei Fursenko, said he opposed the lifting of deferments because the draft was not subject to checks and balances. The Union of Soldiers' Mothers Committees of Russia, a human-rights group and political party, has called for a nationwide referendum to determine who is entitled to deferrals.

I would find it difficult to believe that any reasonable person, after reading such an account, could still assert Bush likely to take a page out of Moscow's playbook.

On the other hand, Bush has been described in near fascist terms, to the contrary, for promoting what he refers to as a "culture of life." Are enforced abortions any more to feminists liking? I'll grant that I'm opposed to broadly legalized abortion, but I do think that somehow the State's imposing sterilization or abortion on women either unwilling or pressured into consent due to social circumstances is even more problematic.

Perhaps, then, if Bush plans to soften his image, he can look to China's humanitarian example. For China, in another recently underreported story from the same page, holds out hope to totalitarian states everywhere (reported by Paul Mooney):

China's Ministry of Education has announced that it will lift a 25-year-old regulation that barred college students from marrying and from bearing children.

Fan Yi, an official in the ministry's student-affairs department, was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying that the policy would no longer prohibit undergraduate and graduate students from getting married and having children while they are enrolled.

Mr. Fan made the announcement last month at a forum organized by Peking University's Center for Women's Law and Legal Services. He did not say when the new policy, which has been under consideration since 1996, would take effect.

The ban has forced students considering marriage, or those who have gotten pregnant, to make difficult decisions -- abandon plans to marry, have an abortion, or end their studies.

Some students said it was unlikely that the move would lead to a surge in campus marriages.

"This will make no difference at all," said Rick Yu, a student at Tsinghua University who said he did not even know there was a ban. "It's stupid to think about getting married when you're still at school."

Cheng Jing, a student at Peking University, praised the policy shift, saying it would be "a step forward in upholding students' human rights."

Shandong University lifted the ban in March 2004, when it issued a provisional regulation permitting students to marry and have children as long as they followed local laws on marriage and family planning. Under Chinese law, men must be at least 22 and women at least 20 to get married, and 23 and 25, respectively, to have children. However, Shandong requires pregnant students to leave the university for one year to take care of their babies and to recuperate.

Chinese colleges were basically shut down for 10 years during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. When they began to reopen, in 1977, many students were in their late 20s and 30s, and with families. As younger students entered the system in the following years, the ministry issued a regulation in 1980 outlawing marriage and childbirth among students. Some colleges even prohibited dating among students.

And yet, the US--with all its capitalist vices and imperialist tendencies and sense of super-empowered cultural smugness--is the freest nation in the world and her people mean to do the most good, however imperfectly her government may sometimes enact her ideals in practice. No, America is not utopia -- but that is too often what we find ourselves compared against. We measure ourselves against such a high standard in the first place because we were founded on rationalist, Enlightenment ideology that, as we have come to reinterpret it to modern means, is precious to nearly every one of us.

But then, this rhetoric of extreme leftist idealistic disgust and despair is nothing new. Few of us now probably know Allen Ginsberg's protest poem "America" -- that held the Russians and the Chinese, and the Red Movement in general, blameless innocents victimized by our nationalist paranoia. In Ginsberg's imagination then, too, America held the power to end war -- not imperialists abroad, or those who would abuse their populations. No, those who reacted against American ideals -- they were the real idealists, those to whom we should look to for our ideals.

You see then, left-leaning readers, your gurus have misled you before, such as Ginsberg was in 1956. No, I didn't say all wrong -- square culture, white culture, the Eisenhower Whitehouse, well -- mistakes were made. But, wrongheaded about how we measured up and to whom, yes, there --

America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time
Magazine? I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad.
She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.