Happy Independence Day!

[Dave Monroe]

"This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl."
--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in
the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there
either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America,
or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed
the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to
it was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some
paranoia.” --Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

"Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? -- in
which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd
Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces and on
West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever,
by the majority of Mankind, seen, -- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for
subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise,
Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever
behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen
and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points
already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent,
changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities
to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away
from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming
them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair."
--Thoams Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

"Didn't we take the King's money, as here we'retaking it again? whilst
Slaves waited upon us, and we neither one objected, as little a we
have here, in certain houses south of the Line,--  Where does it end?
No matter where in it we go, shall we find all teh World Tyrants and
Slaves?  America was the one place we shoud not have found them."
--Thoams Pynchon, Mason & Dixon