Expatriate Manifesto

  A spectre is haunting America—the hollow-eyed and moaning spectre of our nation's decline (2). It haunts the expanding waistlines of our increasingly obese citizenry (3). It lurks among the ineloquent yo's and ho's of our popular discourse, a diminished national conversation of ghetto kabuki, rhyming doggerel and white-boy ebonics. It peeps from the crusty, ragged piercing holes in the flesh of our self-mutilated youth. It rattles its chains at the hubris of our foreign policy and the imbecilic pap of our summer blockbusters. It stalks the parapets of our crumbling democracy, howling at our low voter turn-out and groaning at a republic of television-entranced morons with little knowledge of or interest in the world outside their cycles of compulsive consumption.  

All true patriots shiver in dread when confronted with this spectre that no jump in GDP, world-changing Silicon Valley tech innovation or smackdown of suicidal terrorists can dispel. Conservatives decry a decline in family values while Liberals, a decline in social justice. Many are the scapegoats incorrectly identified as responsible for the invocation of this spectre, and many are the forces that fruitlessly attempt to exorcize it. But it endures and grows in strength of presencea recurring visitation, an adumbration, the ghost of America's future. It endures and grows because this malaise has yet to be correctly diagnosed, nor has a workable remedy been proffered.

Until now.

SHIRTSLEEVES TO SHIRTSLEEVES

Three conclusions can be ineluctably drawn from our nation's founding, rise to world supremacy and current state of spectral decline:

The United States is a nation of brave and daring immigrants, a republic established by rebels whose forefathers were enterprising colonists who dared to establish new lives on terra incognita (4) discovered and mapped by intrepid explorers;

The unmatched success of the U.S. (5) is attributable to the traits of the adventurers, exiles, refugees, immigrants and colonists who settled and forged wildlands into nation: the self-reliance and adaptability required to survive in an unfamiliar land, the audaciousness necessary to depart one's home for distant horizons, the optimism to expect a better life at journey's end;

and, finally (irrefutably),

The descendants of these first-generation Americans have become vicitims of their forefathers' success. Coddled by prosperity, they have lost or abandoned the very newcomer/outlander characteristics that have long composed America's competitive advantage against the mouldering states of Europe and Asia, as well as against other upstart nations of the New World.

For generations we have skimmed the cream of the world's human capital over our borders. The American character was shaped by these striving, ambitious, desperate, driven immigrants, and they made our country the most powerful and innovative on Earth. But that cream has been deposited as adipose tissue on the double-wide ass of slothful and stupid America, and our human capital has been diluted with the ease in which successive generations have lived. We must reacquire the winning traits of our founding fathers. We must reawaken in our citizens the ambition and ingenuity of the newly arrived immigrant.

There is only one remedy: expatriation.

TAXONOMY OF TRAVEL

What is an expatriate? The word is ancient, for as long as there have been human settlements, some men have left comfort and safety behind in favor of the unfamiliar world outside their city walls.

It is helpful to think of travel from Homeland to Strangeland as a category of human behavior that has evolved distinct subcategories, each filling a different niche created by the development of human civilizationfrom first settlement to nation-states to empires to vacation destinations.

The first division in this taxonomy of travel is based on the motive for departure. On one branch there are those who are forced to leave Homeland (whether by expulsion or abduction) or who would be in peril if they stayed: slaves, exiles, fugitives, refugees. On the other we have those who leave voluntarily: explorers, invaders, colonists, migrant workers, immigrants, pleasure-travelers, expatriates.

The subcategories on the voluntary branch can be distinguished first by the length of intended stay upon arrival to Strangeland. Explorers are just taking a look around; pleasure-travelers abide long enough to become acquainted with interesting sites and interested parasites; immigrants aspire to abandon Homeland permanently, or rather to convert Strangeland into a new Homeland.

The expatriate is the most recent branch of this ancient tree, an offshoot of the pleasure-traveler and, like the pleasure-traveler, distinguished from the other types of voluntary traveler by the nonpecuniary impetus for his journey. Explorers living in an unmapped world departed their home shores under royal commission or for mercantile gain. Colonists were the middle-managers of empire, paid to keep the darkies in line. The self-interested economic motivation for the voyages of invaders, migrant workers and immigrants is clear.

Increasingly safe and reliable international transportation gave rise to the pleasure-traveler. For the first time in human history, the principal motive for voluntary travel was not tangible personal gain. International travel was still a luxury, however, and so the original pleasure-traveler was necessarily a wealthy individual seeking the new sensations and pleasant disorientation that occur when visiting a foreign land.

EXPATRIATE: AN AMERICAN INVENTION (6)

Like the pleasure-traveler, the expatriate's displacement from Homeland is not economically motivated. But the expatriate's journey is more than a short diversion from the familiar or an exotic entertainment. The duration of the expatriate's sojourn varies but is measured in years, not months; that, however, is not the only element that distinguishes him from the pleasure-traveler. The expatriate's reason for leaving Homeland is always tinged with an element of dissatisfaction with life in Homeland, ranging from ennui to frustration to disgust. The desire for greater freedom, be it artistic or sexual or political, is a common motivation.

Although there are early examples of expatriate departures from other Homelands, the expatriate can be seen as an American invention, or at least as arising from socio-economic conditions that are most closely associated with Americaa large middle class. Just as the expense of the earliest pleasure travel necessitated that the original pleasure-traveler saunter forth from the well-appointed salons of the upper class, so the expatriate could only have materialized in the middle-class kitchen, an adventure story in one hand and a grilled-cheese sandwich in the other.

Three characteristics of the American middleclass gave rise to the expatriate:

1. Sufficient education to know of the wider world;

2. Sufficient money to make his way to Strangeland (although not by first class); and

3. A psychology of dissatisfaction, restlessness and complaint.

This last middle-class trait comes in many flavors: envy of upper-class freedom, glorification of working-class authenticity, frustration of being trapped in a large class of largely undistinguished Americansthat is to say, the desire to live a life less ordinary.

THE BENEFITS OF ANOMY

The defining aspect of expatriate lifethe sensation, whether they know it or not, that all expatriates are seeking when they decide to depart Homelandis anomy. Anomy is defined as a lack of familiar rules and values. The expatriate must learn the local language and customs. He must find shelter and sustenance with no network of family or friends to assist him. Anomy means the removal of context, both the strictures of prejudice and the false props of family reputation and class. The expatriate is a stranger whose actions are judged prima facie by the locals, qualified of course by common American stereotypes.

Anomy encourages independence, self-expression and the development of new ideas. It is no accident that the most innovative and enduring art of the last century was created by expatriates. Anomy requires self-reliance and initiative. Mental and physical vigor are rewarded by anomy; sloth and hebetude are punished. Anomy inspires humanistic sympathy for the previously strange and unfamiliar and favors the strong and imaginative and individualistic. Anomy is what made America great. A dearth of anomy and its salutary effect on the human organism is responsible for the spectre of our nation's decline.

THE SOLUTION: MANDATORY EXPATRIATION

Heretofore, relatively few Americans have chosen to become expatriates, preferring the ease of life in Homeland. This can no longer be tolerated. A new category of human travel must be created, a graft of the expatriate onto the non-voluntary branch of the travel taxonomy. A regime of mandatory expatriation must be introducedthe forced removal of U.S. citizens to live in Strangeland. This program has precedents; from the military draft during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts to the Peace Corps, the U.S. government has a history of mandating and facilitating international travel.

The proposed program will take the form of an obligatory national service that will, in fact, be an international service. International service in service of the nation: the Expatriate Corps. We will focus on our nation's youth, for if the seed corn be rotten, then the farm must surely fail. If our youth continue to deteriorate in mind and body, then America must surely lose its place of supremacy in the world.

Starting at age 18, all American citizens will be required to live for two years in Strangeland. A Strangeland will be deemed sufficiently strange if it exposes the expatriate to anomy and so reawakens the essential traits that are responsible for our nation's power and glory. Countries like England and Canada would be disqualified as not sufficiently strange Strangelands.

Country assignments will be random and will distribute the American expatriates among the world's urban centers, in contrast to the Peace Corps, which sends the majority of its volunteers to rural sites. Expatriates will receive a monthly stipend equivalent to slightly more than the average per-capita monthly income in the city of residence. Agreements will be made with host countries to permit expatriate travel within the country of assignment but not outside its borders during the two years of service.

Friends and family will be encouraged to visit, but no return to the U.S. will be permitted. Logical exemptions from the Expatriate Corps will be made for those with disabilities or dependents, as well as for U.S. citizens with at least one parent who is a first-generation American.

The Expatriate Corps will be inexpensive to fund and non-bureaucratic. There will be no tests or explicit goals to be met by those serving in the Expatriate Corps. The only requirement is to be sustained expatriation. Penalties for non-compliance will be permanent ineligibility to receive government aid of any kind, as well as a permanent doubling of the normally applicable tax rate on earned income. Poor and wealthy Americans alike will find it extremely inconvenient to shirk their expatriate duties; thus the Expatriate Corps will unite even the most disparate young Americans through a common life-changing, character-building experience.

The domestic benefits of the Expatriate Corps for America will be immediate and profound. Imagine homeboys rusticated from the ghetto and its culture of glorified ignorance to the intellectually charged atmosphere of Paris or Berlin. Enough playing the victim and excusing antisocial behavior as a culture of the dispossessed! We offer a different sort of manumissionfreedom from excusesby sending them to live with people who had nothing to do with their ancestors' abduction into slavery or Nat Turner or Jim Crow.

Consider suburban adolescents with their derivative mass-market identities transported to the streets of Prague or Beijing, there to forge unique identities and experience the joys of individualism. These tattooed and pierced automatons, deluded by fantasies that their facile body decorations render them uniquethey shall abide in Khartoum or Bangladesh or Barcelona, there to question assumptions and gain fresh perspective on such feeble-minded poses.

As for the cutthroat competitive straight-A students with lurid fantasies of Ivy League acceptance and delusions of haute-bourgeoisie grandeur: For those who deem themselves the future leaders of our nation, it's off to Dakar or Riyadh or Caracas. There they shall test their wits in the heart of Strangeland, where prep courses, grade-grubbing and resume-padding will be of little assistance.

A concerned father inquires: But won't you be putting America's youth in mortal danger? Sir, there is far more danger in the children's continued malingering in comfort, complacency and provincialism. The current path poses a grave risk to their future and to that of our great nation.

An ambitious lady protests: Our sons and daughters will be wasting two years when they could be getting ahead in the world! Madame, what use is the mortarboard of a university degree when it perches atop a rotten melon? What use is the fast track when it is the wrong track? Does the world really need more blinkered corporate lawyers or investment bankers who have never considered a destiny other than that imposed upon them by the materialistic fantasies of their overbearing mothers? We are becoming a nation of credentialed cretins, madame, nincompoops with advanced degrees.

Initial domestic resistance will give way to widespread acceptance, as the members of the first Expatriate Corps class return from their service abroad. Anomy will have made them strong. They will return wiser, more creative and more agile-minded. They will enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage over their slightly older peers who were not required to become expatriates. It would not be surprising to see a mass expatriate movement even by those Americans who fall outside the statutory obligations of the Expatriate Corps.

The principal indication of a successful state has long been the number of voluntary travelers that it attracts, be they tourists, migrant workers or immigrants. The hallmark of a failed state is the restriction of their citizens' right to travel abroada locking of the Homeland gates motivated by fear of a mass exodus of the most talented and ambitious individuals to more successful states.

With the Expatriate Corps, the U.S. will be setting a new standard of excellence. We will be known throughout the world as a country so successful that it requires a two-year absence of all its citizens, confident that they will return to their country because there is no other in the world that offers the opportunity, freedom and excellence of America.

We Americans who have resided in Strangeland are uniquely qualified to prescribe this powerful remedy for our country's malaisea remedy whose miraculous benefits we have observed first-hand, a remedy that has made us strong and happy upon our return to our beloved Homeland.

We openly declare that the spectre of our nation's decline will only be exorcized by the forced expatriation of American citizens. Let the rest of the world tremble in envy at the daring genius of our Expatriate Corpsa source of vital new blood for our increasingly anemic nation.

Anomy will be America's salvation! Expatriates of the world unite! Zach Parsi Mexico City March 2004 ^^^  

EXPATRIATE MANIFESTO: PORTENT AND RAMIFICATIONS

HINGA TU PUTA MADRE. (Go fuck your whore of a mother, as my translator, Pedro, later explained.) Those were the first words Zach Parsi ever spoke to me, in response to my request that he participate in the documentary I was making on American expatriates living in Mexico City. It was my NYU film-school thesis project, my opera prima and the culmination of a four-year, soul-scouring curriculum that had transformed me from a callow cinephile into the celluloid craftsman I am today.

When I first arrived in Mexico City, I had modest ambitions of telling the story of Americans who had chosen to take up residence in one of the biggest, dirtiest and most dangerous cities on the planet. Why were they there? What were their dreams? What did they say about my generation's relationship with America? Little did I anticipate the Hitchcockian drama of kidnapping and murder that would play out before the rapt lens of my camera, nor that my little film would both sweep awards on the festival circuit and serve as the critical forensic evidence of a trial in absentia.

CUT TO: big close-up of my happily astonished face.

By the time I approached Zach Parsi with my request, I had already identified and signed up two expatriates, whom I was confident would prove ideal documentary subjects. Both were young Americans in their late twenties living in the Distrito Federal (Federal District, Pedro tells me).

CUT TO: buff and tan Brad Fenwick, a hard-partying Spring Break tour organizer.

CUT TO: pale and skinny Harry Crosby, a retired dot-com millionaire with aspirations of literary patronage.

When the viewer first meets Fenwick and his bright-white toothy grin, "Rad" Brad is busy preparing for the 2003 college bacchanal in Cancun.

CUT TO: Fenwick (omnipresent baseball cap, a gold hoop in each ear, tribal tattoos) explaining to the camera how, as the featured MC at Seor Frogs, he convinces young college coeds to climb up on stage with him and flash their pubic bushes to a howling crowd of boozers. In stark contrast, the camera first captures Crosby in the process of launching an expatriate literary journal called the Gringo Review.

CUT TO: Crosby (bespoke three-piece suit, well-groomed mustache, hank of lank hair flopping over an unmarked brow) appearing Zelig-like on the terrace of Les Deux Magots circa 1922, digitally inserted through computer magic into old footagehe's smoking a pipe while Ford Maddox Ford and Hemingway take their caf crme at the next table.

My thesis adviser suggested that I add a third subject to contrast with these two successful, ambitious and driven foreigners, someone who might demonstrate the darker side of expatriate life.

I first heard of Zach Parsi from Harry Crosby during one of the regular Thursday-night salons that Crosby holds in a 50-room colonial mansion that he had recently finished refurbishing. Crosby hoped that his salon and literary journal would encourage other American artists and writers to move to Mexico City. Already he had gathered about him a coterie of like-minded, ravenously curious intellectualspending PhDs with long doctorals in front of them and years of studying behind breaking barbed bodkins with poets of the oral tradition, journalists with slim waistlines and tight deadlines, and wide-lens photographers with dilated apertures receiving the less-cosseted members of the local diplomatic corpsall of whom felt a common cause with Crosby and his desire to foment an expatriate movement in Mexico City that would attract worldwide attention.

Despite numerous invitations, Parsi never attended these salons. Nor did he answer Crosby's call for submissions to the first issue of the Gringo Review. Crosby described the author as a "misanthrope with absolutely zero vision about how big this expatriate thing could be down here." The young dotcom tycoon-cum-belletrist patron then joined his guests in the living room where, as was custom at his weekly salon, everyone was engaged in a lively exchange while huddled around a large pile of the locally abundant cocaine.

My producer and I (and Pedro, of course) surprised the author in an empty cantina (dolly in through the cantina doors) where he sits alone (closer) scribbling in a notebook (closer) with a tumbler of tequila at his elbow.

CUT TO: close-up of notebook with "Expatriate Manifesto" blocked out in large letters at the top of the page.

In film school, we are groomed to be the storytellers of the future (the written word being, let's be completely forthright, increasingly irrelevant to modern narrative), but we are also taught to be as tenacious as we are visionaryto dream but to pursue that dream like a terrierand so I asked the disheveled and obviously inebriated Zach Parsi again whether he would appear in my documentary. He stood up and (Pedro later explained while barely stifling a laugh, the impertinent little beaner) punched me in the mouth.

FADE TO BLACK.

It was an inauspicious first encounter, and I had resigned myself to using a back-up antihero for my documentaryan odd little consular officer from the the U.S. embassy who obsessively attends the highly competitive professional midget-wrestling matches down here (INSERT MIDGET-WRESTLING FOOTAGE)when Zach Parsi informed me that he had changed his mind.

I was filming at a pre-spring break pool party hosted by Brad Fenwick in his sleek penthouse overlooking the glowing, noxious enormity that is Mexico City.

CUT TO: Brazilian and Argentine exotic dancers imported by Fenwick's travel agency cavorting poolside in the tiniest of string bikinis.

Most of Crosby's salon was on hand and, despite their high-minded literary and artistic predilections, lustily cheering a uniquely Fenwickean inventionhis first annual "floss-my-turd-cutter" contest.

I was directing coverage of the festivities as I had been taught during many grueling film-school seminars (with darkly talented Russian and French masters of the frame and also that bastard Spike Lee) to direct coveragethat is to say, like a fearless general, a merciless assassin and a Persian miniaturist all in one, when

CUT TO: Zach Parsi lurking in the shadows wearing trench coat and fedora like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca;

CUT TO: close up of hand reaching toward Porfirio WitherspoonI was pulled into a dimly lit corner of Fenwick's rooftop Shangri-la.

"Okay, I'll do it," the author whispered. "Meet me at my place tomorrow night. Sorry about the fat lip." And then he was gone.

Later it would become clear to me, as it will to any sensitive viewer of my feature-length documentary, Gringoland, that Zach Parsi and I were irresistibly drawn to one anotherhe needed me to tell his story as much as I needed to tell it.

CUT TO: montage sequence of Zach Parsi and Porfirio Witherspoon eating together at a street-side taco stand, cheering side-by-side at a bullfight, drinking mescal mano-a-mano (Pedro?) in the picturesquely seedy Tenampa cantina.

CUT TO: documentary-style interview of Zach Parsi describing the joy and pain of expatriate life.

Although Gringoland interweaves the stories of three very distinct expatriate Americans, it became clear early on during the six-week shoot that Zach Parsi would be the star of my film. If Brad Fenwick embodies America's outlaw spirit

CUT TO: Fenwick in white linen suit sailing into the sunset with a bulging duffel bag of ransom money on a yacht crewed by statuesque Moldovan prostitutesand Crosby's American poetic soul

CUT TO: Crosby discovered bound and gagged but otherwise unharmed by members of his literary salon in the bushes off of the Calle Lord Byron, his head resting on a pristine, first-edition, autographed copy of A Moveable Feast

Then Zach Parsi is the restless spirit, the eternal outsider, always wandering, never satisfied, ceaselessly striving, hyper-critical, friendless, the malcontent.

CUT TO: Parsi in Casablanca wardrobe boozily navigating his way out of the Tenampa cantina.

The irony of our intertwined destinies adds what one member of the jury at Cannes called "a bittersweet note of dark poignancy that illuminates each pungent frame of this inspired first effort."

CUT TO: Porfirio Witherspoon in black tie accepting the Palm d'Or, the air in the enormous auditorium gone foggy with the musky vapors rising from between the legs of every woman of reproductive age in the audience, but especially Charlize Theron (love ya, babe).

I would be torpid and ungrateful should I not recognize that the phoenix of my filmmaking career has risen from the ashes of Zach Parsi's immolated body.

CUT TO: explosion blowing out the windows of Zach Parsi's run-down apartmentthen burned to cinders, a few charred molars and some blackened bone fragments in a conflagration that also consumed all of his manuscriptsall of them, that is, except his "Expatriate Manifesto."

Soon after being ransomed for a sum that is rumored to have been in the neighborhood of two million dollars, Harry Crosby presented me with the remarkable essay to which I hope these lines serve as a modestly helpful introduction.

CUT TO: Crosby surrounded by his salon, all dressed in funeral black, solemnly proffering the manuscript pages of "Expatriate Manifesto" to the camera. Just a few days prior to his murder, Zach Parsi had finally submitted something for publication in the Gringo Review, but with the stipulation that it be printed simultaneously in New York Press (unclear why) with introduction and annotations by, in Zach's own words, "the man who in a very short time has become my 35mm Boswell and my emancipator from demons that have tormented me for far too long."

Brad Fenwick is still at large, presumably a jolly fugitive sailing among the Caribbean islands off his beloved Cancun like the modern-day pirate that he has always been.

The first issue of Harry Crosby's Gringo Review is in galleys; his Mexico City salon grows in renown by the week; and he is more confident than ever that he stands ground zero at the most important expatriate movement since the Lost Generation.

Surely the publication of the "Expatriate Manifesto" and the implementation of Zach Parsi's tightly reasoned public-policy recommendations will bring many more young Americans into Crosby's fold.

As for myself, I write this introduction (and still with those tedious annotations to researchwill anyone even read them?) while luxuriating chin-deep in a warm bath of acclaim, my scalp tingling with the venomous envy of my film-school classmates, my scrotum shrunk tight by the tender scratchings of Ms. Theron's manicured nails, as well as the inevitable apprehension of following Gringoland with another cinematic masterpiece of comparable heft, depth and acuity. Thoughts of Steven Soderbergh's post-Sex, Lies, and Videotape sophomore slump are never far from mind.

But through it allthe lunches with Spielberg and Hanks, the starlit starlet fellatio, the deal meetings at MiramaxI am haunted by a spectre that drives me forward to make more and better filmsfilms that inform and enlighten, films like Gringoland that confound genres to reveal the truth, never flinching from the ugly, brute aspects of humanity, never tempted to distraction by the facile, beautiful and mild. I am haunted, as all of us should be haunted, by the chastising spectre of Zach Parsia great writer, a great American, a great expatriate. ROLL CREDITS: Porfirio Witherspoon Soho House, Manhattan July 2004 ^^^  

EXPATRIATE MANIFESTO: ANNOTATIONS TO THE TEXT

1. "Zach Parsi." This pseudonym first appears in the pages of New York Press on April 19, 1995 as byline to the third-place winner in the "Worst Day of My Life" essay contest (see "Midnight Blues" p. 18). It is unfortunate that the contest is no longer opena winning entry might well be found in, for example, the travelogue of an exploited aide-de-camp forced by a self-important imbecile to travel into Manhattan each morning from his one-star airport motel/catamite bordello, there to pass long hours searching the dusty archives of a free weekly newspaper. The only pleasure in the entire day of public transportation, eye strain and dust-mite allergies is a delicious lunch of cochinita pibil served in a nearby cafeteria run by good patriots from the Mexican city of Puebla, their undocumented presence just one of many signs that a surreptitious reconquista is well underway.

The "Zach Parsi" pseudonym is so close to its creator's birth name that it is best described as a pseudo-pseudonym, a mask of glass worn by a thief manque. As with Raskolnikov, the pseudo-pseudonym employed by the author evinces a desire to be condemned and punished for his literary misdemeanorsthese off-color stories and mild critiques of New York society. The walls of the laughably shabby Abe Lincoln Motor Lodge are paper-thin; high-decibel acts of unspeakable perversion press in from all sidesfour score and seven groaning orgasms and countingdrowning out even the omnipresent thunder of traffic on the motorway outside. The author soon was granted his wishat the age of 29 he was dismissed from his position at a prestigious law firm for publishing semi-fictional roman--clef-type stories under his pseudo-pseudonym (see "Confidence Game," New York Press, Feb. 5, 1997).

Zach Parsi's relocation to Mexico City from New York City in 1997 was a leap South both geographically and socio-economicallyhis savings were quickly depleted, and for seven years he was only sporadically employed, mostly as a translator of press releases for the corporate clients of a local investor-relations firm. It is fun to imagine how Honest Abe, the great orator from Illinois, might respond to the ear-piercing soundtrack of obscene contortions, lubricious frictions and orgiastic frottage occurring at all hours in the establishment that bears his name. During the seven years of dissolution and poverty that preceded his murder, the author would develop a bitter longing to reattain his comfortable haut-bourgeois Manhattan existencesee the cringingly confessional scenes of Gringoland filmed in Parsi's filthy hovel of an apartment. Pride prevented him from returning home in defeat from his expatriate sojourn. The Abe Lincoln Pervert Lodge is more like it.

Did Parsi's desire to be condemned for his petty subversions evolve into an obsession with committing the perfect crime? Astute observers of Gringoland might reach conclusions that are beyond the deductive faculties of ego-blind, aspiring film-industry whores.

While discussing noms de plume, a brief explanation too is perhaps in order concerning the name Porfirio Witherspoon. The filmmaker cannot deny that he arrived in Mexico as Wallace Witherspoon, that indeed his fellow students at NYU's film school knew him as Wally (except for Professor Spike Lee, who referred to him as "the original vanilla's vanilla"), and that at best they expected waspy Wally to make gentile Merchant & Ivory-style moviesJamesian meditations on the American upperclass and their travels abroad. Nor can the filmmaker deny that when he left Mexico City some months later with 10 cans of exposed film, it was as the self-baptized Porfirio Witherspoon.

A cynical grasp at ethnic cachet at a time when Mexican filmmakers are in vogue? Some might reach this conclusion, however, as the filmmaker often repeated to his ever-vigilant translator (Pedro Bronstein, for the record): "The name just fits, Pedro, and when a name fits, it fits." "Si, seor!" was the translator's consistent and deceptively servile response to this inane piffle, followed always by a sotto voce: "Pendejo!"a name that truly fit and fits and will likely always fit.

Clearly, there are those who accept the names they are given and those who name themselves anew as the situation requires. Consider the great Russian political thinker and leader of the Bolshevik army who resided for many years and (a little known fact!) fathered a child in Mexico City. The great man escapes Stalin's gulag using a doctored passport and thereafter permanently adopts the false identity as his own during decades in exile. Upon his graduation from a down-at-the-heels university in Mexico City, Trotsky's grandson (from the passionate but unofficial coupling with a beautiful and glamorous Mexican art student in June 1940), having inherited the great man's bold political vision, as well as a vague physical resemblance, would discard the surname of his father (an illiterate brute of a taxi driver; his mother, Dolores, being the guardian of the unofficial Trotsky bloodline) to reinstate Trotsky's original family name at the urging of his beloved Dolores, then as now residing in a sanatorium.

Zach Parsi, Porfirio Witherspoon, Trotsky, Pedro Bronsteinan axiom emerges: To take a new name is to be empowered, is to grasp destiny by the tail. Put another way: How can you hope to change the world if you dare not change your own name?

2. "A spectre is haunting" A cheap literary device herethe author apes the form of a famous and innovative text in the hope that a certain structural resonance with the masterpiece will distract the reader from the facsimile's ridiculous content. Here the victims of this petit larceny are Marx and Engel. But whereas The Communist Manifesto was written in earnest only to become a parody upon implementation in Russia under Stalin's iron rule, here we have what appears to be a parody being taken in earnest and published as if it were a true call to action. The introduction (albeit an exercise in epic onanism) and the lucid annotations that accompany the text lend scholarly weight to what would appear on first inspection to be a rather lame joke.

The great strategist Trotskyhis spiritual presence is always nearled the Bolshevik army to victory against imperial Russia under the banner of The Communist Manifesto. Today any such overt action or announcement of intention would result in immediate defeat. Although weakened by its culture of decadence, as well as its foreign adventuresthese debilitating "wars" on drugs and terrorthe enemy is still too powerful and the resistance too unorganized. To what end an Aztlan Manifesto, for example, declaring open struggle toward the goal of reconquista and the reunification of Mexico? It would be a tactical error to offer the enemy a target to strike.

It is much simpler and surer to allow market forces to achieve the same ends. Instead of storming barricades, the foot soldiers are welcomed with open arms as migrant workers, bus boys, melon pickers, nannies, translators. To what end party congresses and proclamations that might awaken the giant from its television-soothed, food-stuffed coma? The great Trotsky smiles down from heaven at the genius of such a plan. Oh, dear father Davidovich, we pray to you for guidance. What is that? The great Trotsky has a suggestion? What is it? Speak, Trotsky, speak!

Let your agents appear defenseless, ignorant, unorganized, weak and exploitedthere will be time enough for pride and retribution, time enough to demonstrate the superiority of La Raza. Oh, jes, jes, si, simy name is Pedro, I am a taco-bender, a wetback, a beaner. May I please pick your strawberries, cut the lawn, translate your idiotic directions on the set of your documentary, weed your garden, scour the streaks of excrement from the toilet bowl, prep-cook your restaurant meals, watch the nice white children while mommy is away at her important job. Si, seor! Si, seora!

So many low-paying jobs that no American will doit is beneath their dignity. But the Mexicans, yes, they will do these jobs no matter how difficult and unpleasant. And so they cross the border by the hundreds of thousands each montha silent invasion. Soon it will be time to rise up and strike. What's that, Trotsky? Yes, dear grandfather, the money is safely hidden.

Trotsky offers an acute observation regarding the manifesto at handlike The Communist Manifesto (written on behalf of the Communist party) this "Expatriate Manifesto" reads as if produced on behalf of a large cohort. And yet Zach Parsi was a misanthropic loner who despised his expatriate conditioncurious indeed. It is difficult to imagine the bitter and dipsomaniac Parsi as flag-bearer for Harry Crosby's salon, a group that he recognized as the effete poseurs and sybaritic degenerates that they are. Was he not also far too inebriatedand, astute observers might also conclude, far too busy with his own plots and schemesduring the period leading up to the explosion that claimed his life to have produced such a document?

3. "expanding waistlinesobese citizenry" See "Adipose Nation" (New York Press, Oct. 9, 2002). Or perhaps the citation is irrelevantdoubts gather as to whether Zach Parsi is the true author of this document.

4. "Terra incognita. intrepid explorers." Except (small, convenient omission) for the indigenous cultures that were already living quite happily on their terra suma cognita when the conquerors arrived and without whose susceptibility to foreign pathogens and subsequent genocide, none of what followed would have been possible.

Consider: A few shiploads of syphilitic European sailors make landfall on ancient terra firma and suddenly there is a "New World." Hernan Cortes and his soldiers slaughter the noble Aztec rulers, and overnight the great city of Tenochtitlan (described as more beautiful than Venice by the primitive conquerors) becomes Mexico City and is set on a path of degradation that leads directly to the chaos and corruption of today's expatriate-plagued megalopolis.

With independence, New Spain becomes Mexico. And when half of Mexico's sovereign territory is stolen by a greedy Northern neighbor in a trumped-up war of cynical aggression, suddenly the territory is no longer Mexico. It is the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah.

The victor's language all but erases that of the conquered. The word "avocado" is derived from the Aztec word for scrotum. Will the degenerate guests of Mr. Lincoln never cease their high-volume acts of perversion? The affair with Trotsky was brieftwo months of passion between the first assassination attempt (heavy machine gun: failure) and the second (alpine-climbing axe: success). America's English dominates the planet, except in America's own backyard, where a new conquest is ongoing.

The daughter born of the union worked as a tour guide for many years in the great man's houselocated in the tranquil Coyoacan neighborhoodwhich was transformed into a museum not long after his murder. To be unjustly accused of stealing certain volumes from the shelves in the great man's (her own dear father's!) old studyit was too much for the poor woman who had been dispossessed of everything that should have rightly been hers. She reached a breaking point. Only her child, Trotsky's grandson, remained by her sideher loyal companion, her champion. How can you steal what is yours? What can those people possibly be doing to each other to make such noises?

And so it is with the reconquista of Aztlanit is not theft, but rather a reclaiminga process of gradual annexation that has gone undetected except for a few shrill commentators who are easily dismissed as culture warriors, racists and xenophobes. Have you visited Los Angeles lately? It already belongs to La Raza! As certain of grandfather's autographed first editions have been reclaimed, so too shall Aztlan! Too late, Samuel Huntington! Too late! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

5. "The unmatched success of the U.S." Theft is the true founding principle of Americathe enslavement of human beings, the misappropriation of land. American history is a catalogue of heinous crimes disguised as brave and virtuous acts. Settlers, pioneers, explorersthese are all euphemisms for the vanguard of invasion, domination, dispossession. Manifest destiny! Manifest banditry!

The caterwauling of deviants makes work difficult and sleep all but impossible. In the darkness of a troubled slumber, there is a vivid dream that has stern and handsome Trotsky with Abe Lincoln bent over his knee. Each resounding smack on those long grayish shanks causes the Great Emancipator to cough up a fat stack of hundred-dollar bills. With each smack Trotsky shouts, "Expat!" Expat! Smack! Expat! Smack! And out comes money every time, as if from a bank machine.

What is it, Trotsky? What does this dream mean? Could it be that this "Expatriate Manifesto" is beginning to lose its air of innocent frivolity? Yes, Trotsky! The document's true nature is revealednot a harmless invitation to youthful adventure, but rather a bold call to invasion. The document may bear the name of Zach Parsi, but it carries the undeniable imprimatur of empire.

6. "Expatriate: An American Invention." As was the atom bomb. But the expatriate is a much stealthier weaponseemingly harmless, deployed under the most innocent of auspices. What a convenient invention!

The filmmaker insists that the following gems of idiotic trivia be included: Expatriatism is a growing trend in Hollywood, with some of the industry's top box-office draws (with whom it would be the filmmaker's honor and privilege to work) living abroad. Johnny Depp resides in Paris with his beautiful French girlfriend. George Clooney spends most of his leisure time in his villa on Lake Como. Daniel Day-Lewis often works as an apprentice to a village cobbler in Italy. The lush and beautiful stationery paper from SoHo House is like a fine shaving from an enormous stick of butter.

Apart from these movie stars, a list of famous expatriates might lead a casual observer to conclude that the expatriate is no more than additional proof of America's decadence and imminent decline. Perverts, drunks and drug addicts figure prominently. In Mexico City we have the notoriously dissolute William Burroughs and Malcolm Lowry. The initial impression of Harry Crosby and his gang of cocaine-addled pseudo-intellectuals is that they are intent on continuing this tradition of debauchery and self-abuse.

Upon closer consideration, however, it is clear that the American expatriate springs directly from the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. Far from being a by-product of middle-class disillusion, as the author of the "Expatriate Manifesto" (clearly not Zach Parsi) would have us believe, American expatriatism was developed by the power-hungry puppet masters as a direct response to the U.S. government's need for local, street-level intelligence in order to help protect and advance U.S. interests abroad.

How convenient that Hemingway and his gang relocate to Paris just after the first World War. A Moveable Feast, you say? Yesif counterintelligence and espionage are on the menu! How coincidental that Americans flooded the cities of Eastern Europe soon after the end of the Cold Warsentinels in Budapest and Prague to ensure U.S. influence over these newly liberated countries. Not surprisingly, many of them would later join the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq.

And now in Mexico City! How to explain the sudden blossoming of a well-funded expatriate movement just as the reconquista begins to take shape. There is only one explanation: The giant has awakened! Worry not, hermanos! Trotsky will lead you to victory. To arms and bombs and hedge clippers! Brothers of Aztlannow is the time to attack! Porfirio Witherspoon Abe Lincoln Motor Lodge Queens, New York July 2004