French on US

The feature length content in Harper's Magazine has been hit or miss the last couple of years, but I consistently enjoy the short stuff at the front - the Index and Readings. This month, I was struck by a snippet by French essayist Charles Dantzig entitled “Liste des Américains," from his Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien, published in France last winter by Grasset &
Fasquelle. The encyclopedia explains the world in a series of 800 lists."

They are a people without balconies. Yet they cannot help interfering in other people’s business, according to the Protestant custom. And on courthouse steps one sees people brandishing signs that say, as if they knew, GOD HATES ABORTIONISTS. It is a country fascinated by lust.

Americans spend less time arguing over things than over the right to speak about those things.

It is the only country in the world where no one remains a foreigner. A person can go by the name of Zgrabenalidongsteinloff and no one will raise an eyebrow. “In New York there are no impossible names,” as I was told by a novelist whose name
raised the eyebrows of elegant racists in Paris. This is what makes everything possible. They walked on the moon because they are the moon. One admires their courtesy.

Anecdotal generalizations like this are usually specious and almost always obnoxious, but I found Dantzig's observations both insightful and charming.

His entire list is well worth reading, but unfortunately I can't link to it because it's behind a subscribers-only wall.