Putting Up With Dumb Americans.(Brief Article)

A few weeks ago, I went to buy some paper for my printer. I use three- hole-punch paper, and at the small stationery store I frequent, it's always on the third shelf across from the creepy inspirational posters. You know the ones I mean: pictures of soaring eagles or sweating marathon runners, with the caption EXCELLENCE IS ACHIEVEMENT or ATTAINMENT IS EXCELLENT ACHIEVEMENT or ACHIEVE EXCELLENT ATTAINMENT or sometimes just HANG IN THERE, BABY!

Anyway, I pick up a package of paper, check to see that it's three- hole-punched and take it to the counter where Edgar, the retarded (or maybe only slightly retarded) man, stands at the ready to collect my money and carefully place my package into a bag. Edgar has been working at the store for as long as I've been going there, which is about seven years, and he and I have developed a certain conversational tradition. He asks if I found everything all right, I say I did, then he babbles some senseless non sequitur in his nasal voice and I say, "Yes, yes," in my strained, cheerful one.

I place the package on the counter. Edgar looks at it, points to the pink stripe running across the logo and shouts, "Pink! Pink!" I smile. "Yes, yes," I say, then look at my watch to convey the urgency of the transaction. "Pink!" Edgar says again. "Yes, pretty pink," I say, and then, pointing to the plastic cup filled with blue pens, I say, "And bright blue," and then, pointing to the display of Post-it notes, I say, "And pretty yellow, yes, yes. Now, Edgar," I add, my voice rising to the exact level where strained, cheerful becomes strained, cheerful, irritated. "Edgar, how much will it be?"

He takes my money--a bit sullenly, it seems to me--and puts my package in a paper sack. I take it home, unwrap it and notice something strange. It's pink paper. The pink stripe running across the package, which I assumed was some sort of graphic design adornment, was in fact purely informational. It means "pink paper inside," which is why Edgar, who has seen me buy white paper about 36,987 times, mentioned it. And on the other side of the package--which, like any normal person, I didn't bother to look at--it says COLOR: HOT PINK in thick black sans serif.

I thought of this recently when I read that Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister, called the newly formed American policy on terrorism "simplistic." The official tone of voice used by European bureaucrats when speaking about the United States passed from strained, cheerful into irritated, condescending back in 1947, when thousands of Americans in uniform were, essentially, standing at the counter, smiling goofily, asking our European friends if they found everything all right. "Yes, yes," they replied. "You can go now." They were eager to get down to the serious postwar business of writing and rewriting their constitutions and nationalizing their industries and inventing Marxist literary theories and so had very little time for American small talk about communism and hamburgers.

And who can blame them? Americans are, for the most part, a pretty simplistic people, not given to complicated theories about life and meaning and movies and all the rest. In fact, most of our crowning achievements--the Internet, the sitcom, the ...