Americans, as Malort liked to say, used to be a wild people. It was a whole country descended from hard-barked frontiersmen and those who’d managed to not get slaughtered by them. The USA had sprouted from soil so saturated with blood that the wells tasted of copper, less a “melting pot” than a meat grinder. It was a land of pissed-off underdogs who couldn’t be governed, simple folk who were polite and generous but with no desire to ever again feel a boot on their neck. They knew what freedom really meant, that liberty produces risk and pain the way a motor produces exhaust, that the spirit of America means not just accepting that fact but amplifying it so that it can be heard coming from six blocks away. Or that’s how things used to be, anyway.
For example, Malort could remember a time when a man could hitchhike all the way across the country, if he so desired. Not because it was safe but because whoever picked you up understood that the world was dangerous and accepted it as such.