The International Writers Magazinee Reality Check

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EXPATRIATE WINDFALL How Renouncing Your Citizenship Can Save You Big $ Good news for smart people. • James Campion Before the Democrats take over and tax us silly in a veiled attempt at yanking this country out of the fiscal sinkhole the Bush lunatics have dug us, the comedy team of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and the Homeland Security Department have offered an out. As of December of this year, all breathing humans, legal, illegal or otherwise will be able to procure a driver's license in the Empire State, joining Arizona, Vermont and Washington as the latest sanctuary for tax evasion.

This means a binding identification to work, bank and the undeniably powerful access to mobility all in one fell swoop; simultaneously subverting the privilege of citizenry while rendering the burden to pay taxes obsolete.

And to think I wasted two years trying to secede from the union, when all I had to do is renounce citizenship and still receive all the police protection, fire department assistance, and several other civic amenities I stupidly pay for currently. Now I'll simply pony up property tax to the state government and gleefully tell the feds to take their crazed warmongering and international nation building and those pork-addled entitlements handed to lazy-ass senior citizens and unemployed crack-baby machines and shove them all.

You have to love the Bush Administration. It will not take no for an answer. The president wanted full amnesty for illegal aliens and was rebuffed with extreme prejudice by a whopping majority of the American people and a surprisingly uncooperative congress. So what? You think a man who joined the National Guard and never showed up could be denied? You think a man who inhaled mounds of cocaine for two decades could not co-opt Jesus into high-profile political gigs? You think a president sitting on the lowest approval ratings since Nero wouldn't start bombing Iran tomorrow?

Bush is a competitor. Yee-Ha! If we know nothing else about Captain Shoo-In, we know that much. Junior gets what Junior wants, and I applaud him for it. Hey, you never know, soon whatever is left of your Social Security will be riding on the mercurial vagaries of the stock market, Bubba.

His partner in this caper, Eliot Spitzer, is an elitist bully, who placates the insurance lobbies in their raping of the middle class while selling the unfathomable idea that unleashing criminals onto our byways will lower rates. By denying the poor their tax-free earnings and pulling illegal aliens from their blessed invisible freedoms into our shackled tax burdens, he has become the uber-liberal bogeyman.

But none of the above is our concern any longer.

It is a new dawn. The Wild West has returned, and rather than decry it like the last angry fossil, it is time to embrace change, strap on the helmet, and cash in.

Issuing formal IDs and handing privileged licenses to lure harbored criminals "out of the shadows" is just the beginning. This is a new age. Legitimate citizenry is for suckers. What do you need to be an American citizen for? So you can vote? Choose from the line-up of drooling troglodytes we're presented each year? Keep it. Not being a citizen means not having to send your kids to be mutilated in the desert for the next half century so the fat chick next door can drive her Hummer down to the Atlantic & Pacific for chocolate slathered grease balls. Next to hailing from the People's Republic of China, what better financial future could you provide the little shit-bags?

It's easy as sin to renounce citizenship. Go to any federal building and ask about where one can change the "status of citizenry". If they ask where you will be living, tell them to deal with your ACLU attorney. Those are easy to get. Since the moment I took the helm here at The Desk I have them on speed-dial.

Once you are an expatriate, move to New York and join the one million "illegals" joyfully roaming untouched. Immediately apply for a nifty Level-Three license. Use it to open a bank account at Citibank, Bank One, or the nearly 40 financial institutions that regularly serve illegal aliens. You can then apply for a credit card from dozens of lending institutions that do so without requesting a single Social Security digit.

Now you're riding the crest of the new wave.

From here getting further phony documentation is easy. Go online. For less than a grand you can have anything you need to bolster your new or old identity. It is best to next weasel into a big company job. Big companies fight like hell to keep you working. And they rarely pay "on the record", which keeps things neat and clean.

Let's face it; being a non-person person is living the dream. Standing for nothing and everything at once. Responsible or accountable for nothing and receiving all there is to receive.
The American Dream.
© James Campion November 2nd 2007
realitycheck@jamescampion.com

READERS RESPONSES Nov 10th 2007
Great article/interview! It looks like you have uncovered some new info.
(ON THE ROAD AT 50 Part I & II)
I really enjoyed reading it although I am surprised it has taken people so long to wake up to the fact that On the Road is not what it is touted as being. Clearly watered down, but also, as Leland points out, not much of a novel having dispensed with most of the things we think of as making a book a novel. It's not even, truth be told, much a genre-buster ... Henry Miller had already been writing pretty much the same sort of novels decades earlier. Miller, in fact, was one of his idols, and he telephoned Henry from Big Sur at one point.
But we Americans love our icons and we will make them into what we want them to be no matter what they actually are.
The log-roll manuscript was, as far as I understand, the 3rd version of the novel.
Jack was utterly full of shit with his so-called spontaneous prose ... that is to say, like every writer other than Andre Breton and a couple of other Surrealists, he revised. Very little of the image Jack projected had all that much basis in fact.
Personally, I think, with the exception of a few stellar moments (the mothswarm of heaven being one of them) On the Road, is not a very good piece of work at all. In fact, one day I will make the argument it--and most of his other books--are not even novels. They are simply journals dressed up as novels.
But that is my own ax, and it doesn't diminish my enjoyment of Jack's work. Desolation Angels is head and shoulders above On The Road, but nothing--nothing touches the writing in the first third or so of Visions of Cody. Unfortunately, he ruined the book with a transcript of a boring conversation that lasts about 150 pages. This is a good example of failing to make his journals, notes, recordings into novels--he just transcribed material he'd recorded. Talk about the lazy man's way out ... and yet the writing prior to that is just fucking stunning.
Vincent Czyz

I also read John Leland's Why Kerouac Matters and thought it quite revelatory, although a tad gushing. I was never a huge Kerouac fan, but I always understood On The Road's significance to the American literary landscape. This is why I thoroughly enjoyed the quotes you culled from him and getting to the bottom of his motivation for uncovering the book again from a totally new perspective. It is amazing how much of the artistic motivation and metaphor is lost on even the most ardent fans of the work, from music to film, etc.
I think it is quite obvious from your article and the Leland book, and what I have been able to read regarding the new "Scroll" version of Road, that Kerouac was on a personal journey of faith and maturity and was angered somewhat by the total ignoring of his tenets not only unfurled in his most famous novel, but in many others. He was extremely consistent in this avenue until his death, and again, I am not a big fan, but know of his work enough to really bridge the gap between what is accepted as fact about the author and Road and what lies beneath.
Fine work.
Stephen Sarpola

The Hilary Machine
James Campion
Madam Shoo-In On The March
The Democratic Party is officially scared, widespread panic is palpable. The consensus is in: Hillary Rodham Clinton is unstoppable and a growing number of Democrats are not sure they like it
James Campion Readers Feedback Oct 2007
Democracy in action

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