Strange. Looking for a good link to the “Abraham Washington” NPC in the game, I stumbled upon this, by a poster from Baltimore himself:

http://www.psu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=191278

Anyhow:

When asked about the history of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham will give a humorous, inaccurate description filled with anachronisms, saying that the document was signed at “Fort McHarry” (as opposed to McHenry) in Philadelphia (as opposed to Maryland), and was taken by plane (!) to Britain, to be presented to the king. He also calls the Revolutionary War the “Evolutionary War”. His issues with history are understandable, considering that after 200 years, the obvious lack of an institution to preserve history would force him to use damaged archives which might have certain names barely readable, hence the incorrect location and “Revolutionary War” becoming the “Evolutionary War”.

If you kill both of the other prospective buyers, Abraham will not offer a speech bonus price on prewar artifacts which you sell him.

His name is obviously a combination of some of the USA’s most famous presidents, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

His name could also be a reference to the two quests he is part of: Stealing Independence (retrieve the Declaration of Independence) and Lincoln’s Profit Margins (retrieve various Abraham Lincoln artifacts).

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Abraham_Washington

Anyways, there’s some cool shit in here.

Our identity as a collective is held upon this idealized image of ourselves as a people. That notion isn’t quite so celebrated nowadays as it once was. Why exactly? I’m curious to trace its demise, probe what changed at exactly what point in history to set us on our current course…

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. A few years, actually…

The way I see it, WWII lead to the 50’s, when everybody smiled but not many people were happy. That lead to the youth movements of the 60’s and 70’s, which fizzled out due to drugs and decadence trumping the love (”the wave rolled back”, as Hunter Thompson said). And that lead into the Andy Warhol-ization of culture in the 80’s, the apathy of the 90’s, and then 9-11 happened.

If anything, 9-11 shocked us out of a depressed stupor we’d been in for decades, that was caused by (and here I finally get to my point…) the fact that, in WWII, we were right. Hitler was an evil that needed to be overthrown, and we were the ones who did it.

And we thought, now that evil’s been beaten, we’re going to live happily ever after. And at first we did, but then life went on and we got confused by the fact that everything wasn’t going happily ever after. And we’ve been trying to deal with that ever since, I think. Maybe I’m simplifying things a bit, but the pattern’s still there. Out of evil comes good, out of good, a different kind of evil. We’re sad because things that were supposed to end never did. But they never do.

What do you do when your parents are considered “The Greatest Generation”? Kind of hard to follow that act.

It brings to mind the end of Watchmen (the comic, not the movie) as well.