While reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, I was struck by their thoughts about the lack of a sense of the past we have in the U.S. In a short note entitled, “The Theory of Ghosts,” the authors write about the relationship to the dead, and thus to the past:
What someone was and experienced earlier is annulled in face of what he is now, or of the purpose for which he can be used. The threateningly well-meaning advice frequently given to emigrants that they should forget the past because it cannot be transplanted, that they should write off their prehistory and start an entirely new life, merely inflicts verbally on the spectral intruders the violence they have long learned to do to themselves. They repress history in themselves and others, out of fear that it might remind them of the disintegration of their own lives, a disintegration which itself consists largely in the repression of history (179).

Still from Pulp Fiction
Butch: “So, Esmerelda Villalobos, is that Mexican?”
Esmerelda: “The name is Spanish, but I’m Columbian.”
Butch: “That’s some handle you got there, Honey.”
Esmerelda: “Thank you. And what is your name?”
Butch: “Butch.”
Esmerelda: “Butch—what does it mean?”
Butch: “I’m an American, Honey. Our names don’t mean shit.”
A stupid old joke:
an East European Jew, just arrived in New York and not speaking a word of English, who leaves Ellis Island with a brand new name: Sean Ferguson. Asked to explain his newly-minted Irish provenance, he tells how his fellow-travellers on the ship warned him that his Yiddish name would not be well-received by the immigration officers and that he was better off thinking of a new name for himself — one with an American ring. Unable to do so, he hears various suggestions from his mates and uncertainly settles on one — let’s say, Andrew Jones.
When his turn comes and he is summoned before the clerk, he is in a highly-nervous state and unable to recall what he decided to relabel himself as. “Name”, asks the clerk and then, trying to be helpful: “nomen?” “Ah, ah — och, shoin fargessen”, he says in Yiddish, moaning that he has “already forgotten”. But the clerk, himself a second- or third-generation Paddy, is more than satisfied with hearing something vaguely familiar, and promptly inscribes the newcomer as ‘Sean Ferguson’ – already forgotten.