The schizophrenia of America is that nowhere else do people choose new identities for themselves more readily, and nowhere else does the public more adore and despise them for it. In past centuries people's names were the spoken telegrams of where they'd come from and therefore who they'd been; this was a time when people were extensions of the very earth beneath them,. In America, roots are the things which bind people and hold them down. People rip the roots out, and then romanticize what's been severed, in that way Americans always romanticize that of themselves they've destroyed: English royalty, the Confederacy, Billy the Kid.
- Steve Erickson,
Leap Year, p.47
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