Mexico has always been a refuge for Americans at odds with the American Dream. The American Dream makes demands: demands of time, effort and value conformity. The only way to escape the demands of the American Dream, within America, is to become homeless. This is a most distressing alternative - it is like diving off of a cliff: easy to jump, difficult to survive and harder still to climb up out of.

Mexico provides a place of almost unlimited squalor potential, yet is still a place from which one can easily return. It is much easier to return to a secure position within the American Dream framework from outside the country than to try to reenter the framework from within. The contempt that America feels for those who have allowed themselves to fall below the minimum requirement of a place to live is palpable, no matter what platitudes politicians spout.

How could it be otherwise? How else could society retain the pressure upon its members to toil and save and spend and have heart attacks, if the alternative is allowed social acceptability?

We are not a communist country: we are a country of individual opportunity and individual responsibility. Fantasies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Animal House strike such a responsive chord because they acknowledge the grievous weight of this responsibility and speculate, "wouldn't it be great if we could have all of this without the responsibility?" But these are fantasies, and we know they are fantasies, and they know we know.

Expatriotism provides an acceptable, if temporary, respite from this pressure. While America cares deeply about levels of participation within the system and places firm demands, Mexico simply doesn't give a squat. It takes many fewer pesos to hole up in a shack along a beautiful coastline in Mexico than it does to live in government-subsidized housing in Buffalo, New York.

Where would you rather be? Basking in the perpetual summer of a snow white beach sipping Margaritas and chuckling at the tourists, or huddling around your short-circuiting space heater in your tundra hovel in Buffalo?

Fictional characters from Fred C. Dobbs to Augie March, to Jimmie Buffett's semiautobiographical musical persona have chosen the Mexican alternative. It's close, warm, and cheap.

"Margaritaville" conjures up all of these vagueries when its caribbean-country-mariachi tune begins. It's happy yet reflective - the lilt of the melody is balanced by an aftertaste of regret. The song is not an unmitigated call to hedonism - it doesn't celebrate the lifestyle into which its protagonist has fallen.