Ever had a time when everything went really wrong, and you felt a massive pit in your stomach?

I do. Well, I did. Well, I sort of still do.

Let's back up. I showed up at 89 Millimeters, a story about a few young people in Belarus. The movie's pretty disjointed - basically, the director shot 130 hours without a specific goal in mind. So there's one person that got political asylum in Germany, one girl that tries to win a dance competition, one guy that paints ... you get the idea.

The overarching idea of the film - especially given the Goethe Institut's series - is freedom. Very early, on the director makes the stark assertion that Belarus is the last dictatorship in Europe, and many of the young people whose stories he tells have a role to play in the democratization movement. What I found the most moving moments were one guy who quotes JFK's "ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" while the filmmaker shows him in front of an old American flag, and one point during a pro-democracy rally where people just start chanting "Freedom!" (what can I say - I'm a sucker for this stuff). Perhaps even better is a girl who dyes her hair red, worked as a journalist, and who absolutely skewers this guy and his colleagues as people with their head in the clouds.

Now, Belarus isn't on the level of tyranny of North Korea, but they do pretty well in the minor leagues. Their president since 1994 is Alexander Lukashenko, who comes straight out of Balding Soviet Bureaucrat central casting. People appeared to suffer no repercussions for talking to the filmmaker, but newspapers and universities get shut down and people get sent to prison if they get too uppity.

Ok. Scene set. Discussion question time. After a few innocuous ones (including one by me on the filmmaker's opinion with regards to international involvement, to which the rep indicated that he really didn't have one, which stunned me), one person came and gave a diatribe on how, yes, Belarus isn't free, but the United States isn't free either because Verizon's a multibillion dollar corporation (and that the 2001 election - not a typo - was stolen).

He wasn't particularly lucid. Fine. The moderator finally shot him down by saying "unfortunately for you, the filmmaker made a movie about Belarus".

Then another guy did the same thing, claiming a mile and half from here in Southeast the infant mortality rate was on par with Rwanda's (actually, a mile and a half is closer to the near baseball stadium, where most the people living there are DINKs). And that you needed a permit to protest. And that foreigners couldn't say certain things.

I couldn't take it anymore. I asked them what country they'd prefer - Belarus or here.

Then a Ukrainian - who had said that she saw bits of the Orange Revolution in Belarus - came back at me and asked why the divorce rate was so high (I still don't get this one).

There was one last question - that jokingly compared Lukashenko to Bush (the moderator responded that Lukashenko saying that the Germans had the right idea in the 1940s really wasn't the same thing) before the discussion died.

I left with the feeling I described above. I wanted to vomit, and I'm not kidding.

The way I see it, there are two potential explanations. One is that I'm wrong, and that the U.S. is one step away - if that - from becoming little more than a one-party state.

The second idea is that the rancor in this country has made people unable to make viable comparisons. I find that infinitely more troubling.

Look. Bush won a close election in 2000. Ever since, he has done some debatable things, some of which were very questionable in terms of their legality. Fine. Democracy isn't perfect. Democracy is messy and it's never perfect. Reagan had his scandals. So did Bush, Carter, Clinton, and basically every president in recent memory.

But these people really thought that present-day America was comparable to Belarus.

It made me sick to my stomach. It still enrages and saddens me now.

I remember something I wrote on September 15, 2001 to a message board - "... the United States is the best option and the only persistent beacon of freedom and hope...".

I still believe that. The U.S. has its problems, but I still can't believe what I heard tonight.