Well I am back. Any regular readers (did I have those?) will have thought I'd been taken into custody by the government. Another dangerous alien off the streets. American readers will have been secretly relieved. You just can't trust those foreigners. They're greedy and rude. And they don't even bother to properly learn the language!

More likely, an angry mob did me in for being what I am un-American. Unrepentantly so. The reality is that I've just been working hard, with no time to write until now, when all the evil people have gone on holiday.

It's been about four months now I've been working as an assistant to a private detective. He's a fair man of medium height, with a Fu-Manchu moustache and think-framed glasses. He likes to talk about anything aside from work and he is generous when we stand before a polished bar. (We usually rendezvous at a strange biker dive on the Lower East side.)

I do most of the leg-work - tailing, photographing, surveying, -- and he reads a lot. He likes the library and has the right connections for thorough background checks. I'd love to tell you what he dug up (of his volition) on my land-lady.

Any way, it's the kind of job that has me doing a lot of listening watching and following. I overhear a lot of absurd, even disturbing things.

In the park last weekend, I hear this guy telling a couple - strangers - how it is: cabbies are greedy foreigners, he says. They just come here for the money, and where do they get off being so rude?! Can you believe they come here, we let them come here, and they have the balls to be so rude!

Well, we oughta just throw 'em all out. Erect a huge dome over America. They should be nice to us. We're giving them a chance they couldn't have anywhere else.

A chance to do what, I thought. Take all the jobs nobody else wants? I've never heard anyone accuse a cab driver of making a lot of money before. For crying out loud, these Sunday Rednecks were driving me crazy, and distracting me from my work; I was watching a lady and her companion for the day, trying to determine if there was any monkey business happening. Jealous workaholic husband, you know. No cliché is too tired to exist in New York City.

So I'm watching this lady and her pal out in a boat on the lake in Central Park. I've paid a couple of kids to play Frisbee in front of me so it looks as if I'm taking photographs of them. Meanwhile I am using my long lens to zoom in on the action in the boat.

But shutting these voices out was impossible. The one guy making statements that would have been construed as decidedly racist prior to last September, the couple nodding emphatically in agreement.

In reality, we're all immigrants. I guess it's ironic that after what we did - our forebears did - to Native Americans, that we are suspicious of people who arrive here after us. It's a paranoia that isn't exclusive to America, but it's still unique. For its short-sightedness. For its ignorance.

For the guilt it shows we've passed down and carried around for hundreds of years.